His Grace — page 28: what you’re looking at

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

22 HIS GRACE. sister Nora dwelt in a modest cottage, not more than a mile from what had formerly been our own park gates. It sounds like a rather painful arrangement, and perhaps it was so to Nora, but I don’t think my mother felt it much. The truth is that, after our great misfortune, she never felt anything verymuch. All the same, there could be no doubt but that the news of my rupture with Uncle John would cause her pain and anxiety ; so that I was very thankful to be able to couple this announce- ment with another to the effect that I had obtained at least temporary employment of a much more remuner- ative character. I found her seated in the little, shabbily-furnished drawing-room, and very frail and old and ill she looked, though she summoned up a smile to welcome me and did her best to disguise what was so evident—that she was in mortal terror lest this unexpected arrival of mine should portend some fresh calamity. There are people whom it makes one’s heart ache to see deprived of the luxuries which seem to be their birthright— people upon whom comparative indigence entails as much actual suffering as positive want does upon those of more robust temperament—and my poor mother was one of these. She had been brought up in cotton- wool; she had always been .delicate and had always been assiduously taken care of; never until her old age had she known what it was to lack every comfort that money could buy ; it was a perpetual miracle to me that she had had the physical strength to survive the successive blows which had shattered her small world into fragments. As for her uncomplaining courage, I did not wonder so much at that, for she was well-born, and that she should do her duty to the best of her Gomi ’ = \ boo “S) (ECO)