... Armstrong has been more than kind. He has got a
woman's heart for tenderness. He thinks every day of some fresh
palliative until the doctors quite dislike him. Fortunately his
kindness gives mother a fleeting gleam of pleasure. She wants me to
marry him--I don't know, I'm sure.... Whilst she's so bad I don't
feel I could take any interest in love-making--and I suppose we
_should_ make love in a perfunctory way--We're all of us so bound by
conventions. We try to feel dismal at funerals, when often the
weather is radiant and the ride down to Brookwood most exhilarating.
And love-making is supposed to go with marriage ... heigh-ho! What
should you say if I _did_ marry--Major Armstrong...? Did you ever
hear of such a ridiculous name as Petworth? I should have to call
him 'Pet' and every one would think I had gone sentimental in middle
age. How _can_ parents be so unthinking about Christian names? He
can't see the thing as I do; it is almost the only subject on which
he is 'huffy.' _You_ are the other, about which more anon. He says
the Petworth property meant _everything_ to the Armstrongs, to _his_
branch of the Armstrongs. But for that, they might have been any
other kind of Armstrong--it always kept him straight at school and
in the army, he says, to remember he was an Armstrong of Petworth.
They have held that poor little property (_I_ call it) alongside the
Egmonts and the Leconfields for three hundred years, though they've
been miserably poor.
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