Chapter 9! It came so quickly. Alice comes over to visit. Is it just me, or are the secondary characters in this book more shallow than usual? In this case, Araminta walks in on Alice "fingering the small silver ornaments set out on a small ebony side-table" (p. 164). Alice has come to tell Araminta that their father has gotten a promotion, so they've sold the house and are moving to Bournemouth. Alice, Mr. Smith, Jason and Araminta have dinner together.
A week or ten days pass. Jason spends more time in Araminta's company of an evening (she sews, he reads - once, he reads Juvenal "in the original of course"), and begins to think she's pretty. They go to the cottage, but the weather takes an abrupt turn for the worse, and they have to go rescue Jason's nephew, who has broken his leg out in the storm. Araminta is sensible in the face of danger.
The book ends (as The Awakened Heart did) with Araminta's decision that she is breaking the spirit of her promise to have a platonic relationship, so she goes to tell Jason that she loves him, but that now she'll have to go. But before she can tell him, he calls her "dear heart", and the book ends happily.
I'll be offline for roughly a week, so I imagine my next post will be in the New Year. I'll be reading Britannia All At Sea while I'm offline, so I expect I'll post about quite a bit of it at once. It's a fun one - it reminds me of the one (can't remember the title) where the Dutch doctor has a vague engagement with the most pedantic, tiresome woman ever: the Betts heroine's patient.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment