Free The Four Swans by Winston Graham

incurable romantic, had given them. The eldest and married one, Morwenna, was dark, with a dark skin, beautiful soft short-sighted eyes, of moderate looks but with a noble figure, just beginning to thicken now with the child she carried. The second sister, Garlanda, who had only come to bring her youngest sister and was returning to Bodmin on the next coach, was sturdy, , country-built, with candid blue eyes, thick irrepressible brown hair growing short, a vivid way of moving and speaking and an odd deep voice that sounded like a boy’s just after it had broken.
    The youngest of the family; Rowella, not yet fifteen, was nearly as tall as Morwenna, but thin, her general colouring a mouse brown, her eyes set close together over a long thin nose. She had very fine skin, a sly look, sandy eyebrows, an underlip that tended to tremble, and the best brain in the family.
     
    At the foot of the hill was a cluster of thatched cottages, a lych gate, the old granite church which dated from 1326, and beyond that the vicarage, a pleasant square house looking on to the river. They went in, dusted the mud and melting frost from their skirts and entered the parlour for tea. There the Reverend Osborne Whitworth joined them. Ossie was a big man with a voice accustomed to making itself heard but, in spite of the fashionable extravagance of his clothes, clumsy in the presence of women. Although he had had two wives, his understanding of the opposite sex was limited by his lack of imagination. He saw women mainly as objects, differently attired from himself, suitable to, receive unmeant compliments. mothers of children, static but useful vehicles for perpetuating the human race, and frequently but only briefly as the nude objects of his desire. Had he known of Calvin’s remark that women are created to bear children and, to die of it he would probably have agreed.
    At least his first wife had so died, leaving him with two small daughters; and he had taken speedy steps to replace her with a new one. He had chosen one whose body appealed to him physically and whose marriage portion, thanks, to the generosity of her cousin by marriage, Mr George Warleggan, had helped him wipe off past debts and improve his future standard of living. So far so good.
    But it had been borne in even upon his obtuseness over the last few months, that his new wife was not relishing her marriage or her newposition. In a, sense he was prepared for a `going off’ in women
    after, marriage for his first wife,, though welcoming their physical union to being with had shown a decreasing willingness to receive his attentions; and although she had never made the least attempt to
    refuse him there had been a certain resignation in her manner which had not pleased him too well.
    But with Morwenna it had never been anything else. He had known - indeed she had declared before marriage - that she did not `love’ him. He had dismissed this as a female, quibble, something, that could easily be got over in the marriage bed: he had enough confidence in his own male attraction to feel that such maidenly hesitations on her part would be soon overcome. But although she submitted to his large attentions five times a week - not Saturdays or Sundays - her submissiveness at times came near to that of a martyr at the stake. He seldom looked at her face when in the act, but occasional glimpses showed her mouth drawn, her eyebrows contorted; often afterwards she would shiver and shudder uncontrollably. He would have liked to believe that this came from pleasure though women were not really supposed to get pleasure out of it but the look in her eyes, when he caught’ it, showed all too clearly that this was not so.
    Her manner annoyed him and made him irritable. Sometimes it led him into little cruelties, physical cruelties; of which afterwards he was ashamed. She performed her simple duties about the house well enough; she attended to the calls of the parish, frequently being out when he