Author: Anthony Trollope
Release Date: February, 2004 [EBook #5140] [Yes,
we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This
file was first posted on May 13, 2002] [Most recently
updated: June 25, 2003]
Edition: 11
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** Start of the project gutenberg
EBOOK he knew he was right
***
This eBook was produced by Andrew Turek.
This eBook was proofread by Joseph E. Loewenstein,
M.D.
SHEWING HOW WRATH BEGAN
When Louis Trevelyan was twenty-four years old, he
had all the world before him where to choose; and,
among other things, he chose to go to the Mandarin
Islands, and there fell in love with Emily Rowley,
the daughter of Sir Marmaduke, the governor. Sir
Marmaduke Rowley, at this period of his life, was
a respectable middle-aged public servant, in good
repute, who had, however, as yet achieved for himself
neither an exalted position nor a large fortune.
He had been governor of many islands, and had never
lacked employment; and now, at the age of fifty, found
himself at the Mandarins, with a salary of 3,000 pounds
a year, living in a temperature at which 80 in the
shade is considered to be cool, with eight daughters,
and not a shilling saved. A governor at the Mandarins
who is social by nature and hospitable on principle,
cannot save money in the islands even on 3,000 pounds
a year when he has eight daughters. And at the
Mandarins, though hospitality is a duty, the gentlemen
who ate Sir Rowley’s dinners were not exactly
the men whom he or Lady Rowley desired to welcome
to their bosoms as sons-in-law. Nor when Mr Trevelyan
came that way, desirous of seeing everything in the
somewhat indefinite course of his travels, had Emily
Rowley, the eldest of the flock, then twenty years
of age, seen as yet any Mandariner who exactly came
up to her fancy. And, as Louis Trevelyan was
a remarkably handsome young man, who was well connected,
who had been ninth wrangler at Cambridge, who had
already published a volume of poems, and who possessed
3,000 pounds a year of his own, arising from various
perfectly secure investments, he was not forced to
sigh long in vain. Indeed, the Rowleys, one and
all, felt that providence had been very good to them
in sending young Trevelyan on his travels in that
direction, for he seemed to be a very pearl among
men. Both Sir Marmaduke and Lady Rowley felt that
there might be objections to such a marriage as that
proposed to them, raised by the Trevelyan family.
Lady Rowley would not have liked her daughter to go
to England, to be received with cold looks by strangers.
