Her Faithful Knight — page 142: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

CHAPTER XIII. DARCY’S MOTHER. Lady Derrick was a woman of about sixty years of age, who in early youth had been renowned for beauty of a characteristic Southern type, an olive-complexioned, oval- faced Madonna, with liquid, black-fringed eyes and a lithe, slender figure. During more than forty years of married life her hus- band had spoiled her, and she had accepted his devotion with languid grace, neglecting him and her other children in order to lavish an unreasoning love upon her second son, Darcy. Darcy’s good looks and gentle ways, Darcy’s literary and poetic gifts, his charming good humor and love of feminine society, his horror of violence and vulgarity and the deferential tenderness of his manner toward his mother, delighted her, and were in striking contrast to the peevish irritability of her sickly first-born and the un- sympathetic tastes of her four other noisy fox-hunting sons and daughters. Darcy was not like a Derrick at all; that was, no doubt, why his father and his brothers and sisters failed to ap- preciate him—they were envious of his beauty, his genius, and his extreme popularity among women. So, at least, his mother decided, and with the peculiar obstinancy of certain very gentle-mannered women she had upheld her _ favorite son in all his quarrels with his father and sup- plied him with money until her private allowance was practically exhausted. Eomichbooks (E@)