Mrs. Engels Read Online Free

black.
    â€œThis way it will be an even bigger surprise!” he says, bringing forth more laughter and clapping from the family gathered on the threshold, and though I notice I’m allowing it to happen, I do say to myself, I says, “Can’t I just see the blessed thing? Must it be one of their games?”
    He’s gone and put his new neckerchief over my face as a blindfold.

III. A Resting Place
    A donkey’s age, it takes him, to get the wretched thing off. Two, four, six taps of my boot and still he’s behind me, fighting with the knot.
    â€œWhat’s keeping you?” I says.
    â€œPatience, Lizzie,” he says, and I know it’d be no use telling him again, at this late stage, that his time in Manchester has turned him into a northern stumpole.
    I feel him wiggle his finger underneath the neckerchief; now I hear him bite into it and grind it between his ivories. The cotton presses tight against my nose, which tells me it’s not really new, this rag. It’s one of the old ones from the Club, still smelling of cigars and bear’s grease.
    With a last wet groan, he gets it free. A curved terrace of houses—dream palaces—unrolls itself in front of me.
    â€œPrimrose Hill,” he says, and turns me round to face the hill of grass that rises out of the ground where the terrace ends on the opposite side of the road.
    â€œAre those sheep?” I says.
    â€œAnd this one”—he turns me again, this time to meet a giant face of plaster and brick—“is ours.”
    I have to creak my neck back to see to the top of it. The brightness of the day gleams up its windows. Three floors. Iron railings. An area. A basement.
    â€œWell?” he says.
    My heart feels faint, which can happen when you make the acquaintance of a real future to replace the what-might-be.
    â€œHave you nothing to say? Hot and cold water all the way up!”
    Dazed by light feeling, I clutch at my throat and dither about stepping over the doorsill. “Bless and save us, Frederick, I don’t know. It’s awful grand.”
    As I make my way around—the green room already filled with flower and plant, the laundry room fit for an army, the cloakroom with hooks for a hundred, the cellar bigger than the one I myself was reared in—I can’t help holding on to the walls and the tables to keep myself on end. I keep expecting a steadying hand from Frederick, but it doesn’t come. Something isn’t right with him. A flash temper has come over him. When I point something out, he makes sure to bid his interest the other way. When I open a door on the left, he opens one on the right. When I go to look at a wardrobe, he goes to look at a lamp.
    â€œShe’s done a fine job,” I says. “A fine job.”
    But he doesn’t answer. It must be that he doesn’t like what she’s done.
    And, to be honest, I can see why.
    In her book, there’s naught worse than a new house that looks new. She said so just now before we left. “So long as the thirst for novelty exists independently of all aesthetic considerations,” she went, “the aim of Manchester and Sheffield and Birmingham will be to produce objects which shall always appear new. And, Lizzie, is there anything more depressing than that luster of newness?”
    And I went to myself, “Aye, the smell of decay,” and took her attitude for a London attitude, set square against sense. But what do I know? She’s the baroness and knows better about the styles. (How she ended up with a cruster like Karl is anyone’s wager. He must have thought that, because her family tree has as many rebels as it does nobles, she’d have the right opinions about everything, already there in her blood. And she must have thought, well, she must have thought he was intellectual and clever, the kind of man that’ll win glory on earth, which only goes to show how little true wisdom there is