The Ogilvies —— A Novel

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ISBN: 9781334667558 出版年：2016 页码：502 Mrs Dinah Maria Mulock Craik Forgotten Books

The carriage rolled through the unfrequented roads that mark the environs of the metropolis. Katharine sat watching the light which the carriage-lamps threw as they passed, illumining for a moment the formal, leafless hedges, until every trace of rurality was lost in the purely suburban character of the villa-studded road. The young girl's vision and the most outward fold of her thoughts received all these things; but her inner mind was all the while revolving widely different matters, and chiefly, this unseen world of society, — about which she had formed various romantic ideas, the predominant one being that it was a brilliant dazzling compound of the scenes described in Bulwer's Godolphin, and Mrs. Gore's novels, passim. It is scarcely possible to imagine a girl more utterly ignorant of the realities of life than was Katharine Ogilvie at sixteen. Delicate health had made her childhood solitary, and though fortune had bestowed on her troops of cousin playfellows, she had known little of any of them excepting Hugh and his sister. She had seen nothing of society, or of the amusements of life, for her rather elderly parents rarely mingled in the world. Mr. And Mrs. Ogilvie were a pattern couple for individual excellence and mutual obser vance of matrimonial proprieties. United in middle life their existence flowed on in a placid stream, deep, silent.