文档介绍：FRIVOLOUS CUPID
FRIVOLOUS CUPID
BY SIR ANTHONY HOPE HAWKINS
(ANTHONY HOPE, PSEUD.)
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FRIVOLOUS CUPID
CHAPTER I.
RELUCTANCE.
I.
Neither life nor the lawn-tennis club was so full at Natterley that the
news of Harry Sterling's return had not some importance.
He came back, moreover, to assume a position very different from his
old one. He had left Harrow now, departing in the sweet aroma of a long
score against Eton at Lord's, and was to go up to Oxford in October.
Now between a schoolboy and a University man there is a gulf, indicated
unmistakably by the cigarette which adorned Harry's mouth as he walked
down the street with a newly acquiescent father, and thoroughly realized
by his old playmates. The young men greeted him as an equal, the boys
grudgingly accepted his superiority, and the girls received him much as
though they had never met him before in their lives and were pressingly in
need of an introduction. These features of his reappearance amused Mrs.
Mortimer; she recollected him as an untidy, shy, pretty boy; but mind,
working on matter, had so transformed him that she was doubtful enough
about him to ask her husband if that were really Harry Sterling.
Mr. Mortimer, mopping his bald head after one of his energetic failures
at lawn tennis, grunted assent, and remarked that a few years more would
see a like development in their elder son, a remark which bordered on
absurdity; for Johnny was but eight, and ten years are not a few years to a
lady of twenty-eight, whatever they may seem to a man of forty-four.
Presently Harry, shaking himself free from an entangling group of the
Vicarage girls, joined his father, and the two came across to Mrs.
Mortimer.
She was a favorite of old Sterling's, and he was proud to present his
handsome son to her. She listened graciously to his jocosities, stealing a
glance at Harry when his father called him "a good boy." Harry blushed
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FRIVOLOUS CUPID
and assumed an air of indifferen