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The Reflections of Ambrosine, by Elinor Glyn 1 The Reflections of Ambrosine, by Elinor Glyn The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Reflections of Ambrosine, by Elinor Glyn This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net Title: The Reflections of Ambrosine A Novel Author: Elinor Glyn Release Date: March 18, 2004 [EBook #11624] Language: English The Reflections of Ambrosine, by Elinor Glyn 2 Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE REFLECTIONS OF AMBROSINE *** Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Keren Vergon, William Flis and PG Distributed Proofreaders The Reflections of Ambrosine A Novel by Elinor Glyn NOTE In thanking the readers who were kind enough to appreciate my "Visits of Elizabeth," I take this opportunity of saying that I did not write the two other books which appeared anonymously. The titles of those works were so worded that they gave the public the impression that I was their author. I have never written any book but the "Visits of Elizabeth." Everything that I write will be signed with my name, ELINOR GLYN BOOK I I I have wondered sometimes if there are not perhaps some disadvantages in having really blue blood in one's veins, like grandmamma and me. For instance, if we were ordinary, common people our teeth would chatter naturally with cold when we have to go to bed without fires in our rooms in December; but we pretend we like sleeping in "well-aired rooms"--at least I have to. Grandmamma simply says we are obliged to make these small The Reflections of Ambrosine, by Elinor Glyn 3 economies, and to grumble would be to lose a trick to fate. "Rebel if you can improve matters," she often tells me, "but otherwise accept them with calmness." We have had to accept a good many things with calmness since papa made that tiresome speculation in South America. Before that we had a nice apartment in Paris and as many fires as we wished. However, in spite of the comfort, grandmamma hated papa's "making" money. It was not the career of a gentleman, she said, and when the smash came and one heard no more of papa, I have an idea she was almost relieved. We came first over to England, and, after long wanderings backward and forward, took this little furnished place at the corner of Ledstone Park. It is just a cottage--once a keeper's, I believe--and we have only Hephzibah and a wretched servant-girl to wait on us. Hephzibah was my nurse in America before we ever went to Paris, and she is as ugly as a card-board face on Guy Fawkes day, and as good as gold. Grandmamma has had a worrying life. She was brought up at the court of Charles X.--can one believe it, all those years ago!--her family up to that having lived in Ireland since the great Revolution. Indeed, her mother was Irish, and I think grandmamma still speaks French with an accent. (I hope she will never know I said that.) Her name was Mademoiselle de Calincourt, the daughter of the Marquis de Calincourt, whose family had owned Calincourt since the time of Charlemagne or something before that. So it was annoying for them to have had their heads chopped off and to be obliged to live in Dublin on nothing a year. The grandmother of grandmamma, Ambrosine Eustasie de Calincourt, after whom I am called, was a famous character. She was so good-looking that Robespierre offered to let her retain her head if she would give him a kiss, but she preferred to drive to the guillotine in the cart with her friends, only she took a rose to keep off the smell of the common people, and, they say, ran up the steps smiling. Grandmamma has her miniature, and it is, she says, exactly like me. The Reflections of Ambrosine, by Elinor Glyn 4 I have heard that grandmamma's marriage with grandpapa--an Englishman--was considered at the time to be a very suitable affair. He had also ancestors since before Edward the Confessor. However, unfortunately, a few years after their marriage (grandmamma was really un peu passée when that took place) grandpapa made a bêtise--something political or diplomatic, but I have never heard exactly what; anyway, it obliged them to leave hurriedly and go to America. Grandmamma never speaks of her life there or of grandpapa, so I suppose he died, because when I first remember things we were crossing to France in a big ship--just papa, grandmamma, and I. My mother died when I was born. She was an American of one of the first original families in Virginia; that is all I know of her. We have never had a great many friends--even when we lived in Paris--because, you see, as a rule people don't live so long as grandmamma, and the other maids of honor of the court of Charles X. were all buried years ago. Grandmamma was eighty-eight last July! No one would think it to look at her. She is not deaf or blind or any of those annoying things, and she sits bolt-upright in her chair, and her face is not very wrinkled--more like fine, old, white kid. Her hair is arranged with such a chic; it is white, but she always has it a little powdered as well, and she wears such becoming caps, rather like the pictures of Madame du Deffand. They are always of real lace--I know, for I have to mend them. Some of her dresses are a trifle shabby, but they look splendid when she puts them on, and her eyes are the eyes of a hawk, the proudest eyes I have ever seen. Her third and little fingers are bent with rheumatism, but she still polishes her nails and covers the rest of her hands with mittens. You can't exactly love grandmamma, but you feel you respect her dreadfully, and it is a great honor when she is pleased. I was twelve when we left Paris, and I am nineteen now. We have lived on and off in England ever since, part of the time in London--that was dull! All those streets and faces, and no one to speak to, and the mud and the fogs! During those years we have only twice had glimpses of papa--the shortest visits, with long talks alone with grandmamma and generally leaving by the early train. The Reflections of Ambrosine, by Elinor Glyn 5 He seems to me to be rather American, papa, and very coarse to be the son of grandmamma; but I must say I have always had a sneaking affection for him. He never takes much notice of me--a pat on the head when I was a child, and since an awkward kiss, as if he was afraid of breaking a bit of china. I feel somehow that he does not share all of grandmamma's views; he seems, in fact, like a person belonging to quite another world than ours. If it was not that he has the same nose and chin as grandmamma, one would say she had bought him somewhere, and that he could not be her own son. Hephzibah says he is good-natured, so perhaps that is why he made a bêtise in South America. One ought never to be called good-natured, grandmamma says--as well write one's self down a noodle at once. While we were in Paris we hardly ever saw papa either; he was always out West in America, or at Rio, or other odd places. All we knew of him was, there was plenty of money to grandmamma's account in the bank. Grandmamma has given me most of my education herself since we came to England, and she has been especially particular about deportment. I have never been allowed to lean back in my chair or loll on a sofa, and she has taught me how to go in and out of a room and how to enter a carriage. We had not a carriage, so we had to arrange with footstools for the steps and a chair on top of a box for the seat. That used to make me laugh!--but I had to do it--into myself. As for walking, I can carry any sized bundle on my head, and grandmamma says she has nothing further to teach me in that respect, and that I have mastered the fact that a gentlewoman should give the impression that the ground is hardly good enough to tread on. She has also made me go through all kinds of exercises to insure suppleness, and to move from the hips. And the day she told me she was pleased I shall never forget. There are three things, she says, a woman ought to look--straight as a dart, supple as a snake, and proud as a tiger-lily. Besides deportment I seem to have learned a lot of stuff that I am sure no English girls have to bother about, I probably am unacquainted with half the useful, interesting things they know. The Reflections of Ambrosine, by Elinor Glyn 6 We brought with us a beautifully bound set of French classics, and we read Voltaire one day, and La Bruyère the next, and Pascal, and Fontenelle, and Molière, and Fénelon, and the sermons of Bossuet, and since I have been seventeen the Maximes of La Rochefoucauld.