Free After My Fashion by John Cowper Powys

Downs.
    The little house they lived in had quite recently been ‘done over’, and as the girl ran down and entered the breakfast room she felt proud of the effect of the labour she and Grace had bestowed upon it. Everything looked so peculiarly cheerful with fresh-painted wood and whitewashed walls and clean chintz covers and curtains.
    She had got rid of a drawing room altogether and she and her father had their meals in a lightly furnished south-aspected room which she used during the rest of the day as her own resort.
    But the nicest room in the house was her father’s study, a large airy place with a low ceiling and french windows opening on the garden.
    Here her father kept his natural history collections – cabinets of birds’ eggs and bureau drawers full of butterflies and moths – and here he read an endless sequence of scientific volumes.
    The Vicar of Littlegate was a lean Don Quixote-looking old man with a long narrow face and melancholy blue eyes. He was very tall and his knotted fingers, as he stooped over his food, touching, the bread as if it were a botanical specimen laid out to be examined, hung from his thin arms like the fantastic hands of a withered ash tree.

    On this particular morning Mr Moreton seemed to have no appetite for anything but bread, which he ate in large mouthfuls, washing it down with enormous cups of sugarless, milkless tea. He kept rising from his chair when his daughter needed anything from the sideboard, and was always putting things on her plate and encouraging her to eat, with little friendly exclamations as if she were some pet animal rather than the mistress of the house.
    â€˜Some more furniture came yesterday for that little place of Canyot’s,’ he remarked with a glance at the window. ‘He ought to be able to move in in a day or two. It’ll be nice for him after the farm. I hope Betsy-Anne’s Rose will look after him all right. She’ll be able to be there most of the days. She’s a funny rough girl; but a good girl I daresay. She comes to the Sacrament.’ And he sighed heavily.
    â€˜Yes, it’ll certainly be much nicer for Robert up there than down at the farm,’ responded Nelly, looking anxiously at the old man’s troubled face.
    â€˜It’s what he’s been aiming at ever since you and he were engaged,’ continued Mr Moreton. ‘He’s good to me, is Rob Canyot. He understands my difficulty. He agrees with me that I can’t go on as I’m going on now. It was because he saw how I love this place for the sake of the plants and the birds and the insects that he first thought of taking it, I believe. It was a good kind thought of his, my dear, and I hope you’ll make a good wife to him.’
    Nelly’s delicate transparent cheeks lost every drop of colour. ‘But, dear Father, you don’t mean to say that Robert wants us to be married quite soon? I thought – oh, I thought – that it wasn’t to be for several years! I didn’t dream that he intended me to live in Hill Cottage.’
    The old man fidgeted a little and looked uneasy. ‘Well, I ought to tell you, perhaps,’ he said, ‘that I did discuss things with Rob Canyot quite openly the other night. I told him frankly that if I resigned my living I should be totally without an income. He agreed with me that at my age and with my book on Sussex flora unfinished it would be wrong for me to try my hand at any other work. And so – to cut it short – he was very kind and said that of course I could live with you at the cottage. He said that his pictures had begun to sell well and that in addition to what he made that way he had a generous allowance from his mother. In fact he toldme not to worry about the matter any further, but to consider it settled. He put it in such a way as to make me feel quite happy about living with you – as if my being with him, you know, and our conversations