Page:Stories Revived (3 volumes, London, Macmillan, 1885), Volume 3.djvu/19

 10 STORIES REVIVED.

II.

To appreciate the importance of this conversation the reader must know that Miss Gertrude Whit- taker was a young woman of four -and -twenty, whose father, recently deceased, had left her alone in the world, with a large fortune, accumulated by various enterprises in that part of the State. He had appointed a distant and elderly kinswoman, by name Miss Pendexter, as his daughter's house- hold companion ; and an old friend of his own, known to combine shrewdness with integrity, as her financial adviser. Motherless, country-bred, with rather thick features, Gertrude on reaching her majority had neither the tastes nor the manners of a fine lady. Of a vigorous, active constitu- tion, with a warm heart, a cool head, and a very pretty talent for affairs, she was, in virtue both of her wealth and of her tact, one of the principal persons of the country-side. These facts had forced her into a prominence which she made no attempt to elude, and in which she now felt thoroughly at home. She knew herself to be a power in the land ; she knew that, present and absent, she was continually talked about as the rich Miss Whittaker ; and although as modest as a woman need be, she was neither so timid nor so nervous as to wish to shirk her implied obliga- tions. Her feelings were indeed, throughout, strong, rather than delicate ; and yet there was in her whole nature, as the world had learned to look at it, a kind of genial discretion which at-