Jim’s Reviews > Wives and Daughters > Status Update

All these days the buzzing gossip about Molly's meetings with Mr Preston, her clandestine correspondence, the secret interviews in lonely places, had been gathering strength and assuming the positive form of scandal.

[O]nce or twice I've thought I would marry Mr. Preston out of pure revenge, and have him for ever in my power—only I think I should have the worst of it; for he is cruel in his very soul—tigerish, with his beautiful striped skin and relentless heart. I have so begged and begged him to let me go without exposure.

At first [Molly] made herself uncomfortable with questioning herself as to how far it was right to leave unnoticed the small domestic failings -- the webs, the distortions of truth which had prevailed in their household ever since her father's second marriage.

Osborne now reproached himself with having done Mrs. Gibson injustice. She was evidently a weak, but probably a disinterested, woman; and it was only a little bit of ill-temper on her part which had caused her to speak to Roger as she had done.

Osborne was shut out by his fastidiousness and his (pseudo) genius.

"You are very kind, Miss Browning, but, you see, I hardly like to let them go—they are not out, you know, till after the Easter ball."

"Till when we are invisible," said Cynthia, always ready with her mockery to exaggerate any pretension of her mother's. "We are so high in rank that our sovereign must give us her sanction before we can play a round game at your house."

Mrs Gibson was dressed for receiving callers, and made the effect she always intebded to produce, of a very pretty woman, no longer in her first youth, but with such soft manners and such a caressing voice, that people forgot to wonder what her real age might be.

Every young girl of seventeen or so, who is at all thoughtful, is very apt to make a Pope out of the first person who presents to her a new or larger system of duty than that by which she has been unconsciously guided hitherto.

She was afraid of saying anything, lest the passion of anger, dislike, indignation -- whatever it was that was boiling up i9n her breast -- should find vent in cries and screams, or worse, in raging words that could never be forgotten.