Library / Literature & Fiction
Marm Lisa
- Pages
- about 130
- Category
- Literature & Fiction
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 2.4 h at 250 wpm
From the opening
‘“Mistress Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?”
“With silver bells and cockle shells,
And little maids all in a row.”’
MISTRESS MARY’S Garden did grow remarkably well, and it was wonderfully
attractive considering the fact that few persons besides herself saw
anything but weeds in it.
She did not look in the least a ‘contrary’ Miss Mary, as she stood on a
certain flight of broad wooden steps on a sunshiny morning; yet she was
undoubtedly having her own way and living her own life in spite of
remonstrances from bevies of friends, who saw no shadow of reason or
common-sense in her sort of gardening. It would have been foolish enough
for a young woman with a small living income to cultivate roses or
violets or lavender, but this would at least have been poetic, while the
arduous tilling of a soil where the only plants were little people ‘all
in a row’ was something beyond credence.
The truth about Mistress Mary lay somewhere in the via media between
the criticisms of her sceptical friends and the encomiums of her
enthusiastic admirers. In forsaking society temporarily she had no
rooted determination to forsake it eternally, and if the incense of love
which her neophytes for ever burned at her shrine savoured somewhat of
adoration, she disarmed jealousy by frankly avowing her unworthiness and
lack of desire to wear the martyr’s crown. Her happiness in her chosen
vocation made it impossible, she argued, to regard her as a person worthy
of canonisation; though the neophytes were always sighing to
‘have that little head of hers
Painted upon a background of pale gold.’
She had been born with a capacity for helping lame dogs over stiles;
accordingly, her pathway, from a very early age, had been bestrewn with
stiles, and processions of lame dogs ever limping towards them. Her
vocation had called her so imperiously that disobedience was impossible.
A short sample. Read the whole book
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