Dr. Janet of Harley Street / a novel by Arabella Kenealy.

  • Kenealy, Arabella.
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Dr. Janet of Harley Street / a novel by Arabella Kenealy. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    her beautiful hands and lips are warm and tender. But Phyllis Eve belonged not to the order of painted waxen womankind. Even on that morning of her marriage, when she was but a girl in years and growth, she showed symptoms of that femi- nine subtlety—that nameless charm of mysterious and latent passion without which the most physi- cally perfect woman fails to be attractive. While she muses dreamily—the hours which are bringing her destiny creeping across the face of the sun-dial in grave, dark shade—let us briefly consider the circumstances under which she has grown to girlhood, and is so soon to pass the marriage-gates. Her mother, the wife of a country rector, had, some three years previously, been suddenly widowed, her husband dying all at once from an unsuspected heart-disease. Trusting to what he had regarded as an iron constitution, and, more- over, suffering from the pecuniary exigencies which attach to many country livings, he had failed to provide suitably for his wife and daughter, so that these were at his death thrown upon the world, with nothing but a very small annuity. Mrs. Eve, heart-broken at her husband’s death, withdrew to a distance and settled in a small village in Devon. Here she rented a cottage