The blame--if it is to
be laid--must be upon her mother when she, knowing Ingram's story of
miserable marriage and separation, allowed the man to continue a friend of
the house, be much with her girl, and unfold himself under her clear young
eyes. What she was about--that masterful, self-absorbed woman--there's no
saying. It was always supposed that, with five beautiful daughters to
market, she had pushed Welbore Percival--Thomas Welbore Percival, East
India merchant of The Poultry--into lavish entertainment of his friends
and acquaintance. Ingram, a squire and son of squires, was perhaps a shade
above her degree; she may have required him to give a tone. This,
considering that wretched marriage of his--a month's engagement in
defiance of head-shaking, a blazing Hanover Square wedding, a year's
bickering, one month's acrimony (done by letter) and Ingram's unquenchable
hatred of the woman--this, I say, you may well doubt. But I can give no
other explanation. He came, he talked in his high-voiced, querulous,
bitter-humoured way, he saw and sought the grave young Sanchia, and he won
her pitying heart directly he had engrossed her watching eyes.
She was a girl intensely interested in a hundred dawning things, to whom
love had come late.
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