The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Benefactress, by Elizabeth Beauchamp

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Title: The Benefactress

Author: Elizabeth Beauchamp

Release Date: October 20, 2009 [EBook #30302]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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The Benefactress

BY THE AUTHOR OF "ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN"

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.
1901

_All rights reserved_

Copyright, 1901,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Norwood Press
J. S. Gushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.

Man bedarf der Leitung
Und der maennlichen Begleitung.

WILHELM BUSCH.

THE BENEFACTRESS

CHAPTER I

When Anna Estcourt was twenty-five, and had begun to wonder whether the
pleasure extractable from life at all counterbalanced the bother of it,
a wonderful thing happened.

She was an exceedingly pretty girl, who ought to have been enjoying
herself. She had a soft, irregular face, charming eyes, dimples, a
pleasant laugh, and limbs that were long and slender. Certainly she
ought to have been enjoying herself. Instead, she wasted her time in
that foolish pondering over the puzzles of existence, over those
unanswerable whys and wherefores, which is as a rule restricted, among
women, to the elderly and plain. Many and various are the motives that
impel a woman so to ponder; in Anna's case the motive was nothing more
exalted than the perpetual presence of a sister-in-law. The
sister-in-law was rich--in itself a pleasing circumstance; but the
sister-in-law was also frank, and her husband and Anna were entirely
dependent on her, and her richness and her frankness combined urged her
to make fatiguingly frequent allusions to the Estcourt poverty. Except
for their bad taste her husband did not mind these allusions much, for
he considered that he had given her a full equivalent for her money in
bestowing his name on a person who had practically none: he was Sir
Peter Estcour