Mrs. Norbury Quotes

Mrs. Norbury was delighted to see them, as she always was to see any man in her house who came up to the necessary standard of eligibility.

When her life-work was completed, and summed up in those beautiful words: “A marriage has been arranged, and will shortly take place, between Angela, daughter of the late John Norbury....” then she would utter a grateful Nunc dimittis and depart in peace—to a better world, if Heaven insisted, but preferably to her new son-in-law’s more dignified establishment.

But it was not as “eligibles” that the visitors from the Red House were received with such eagerness to-day, and even if her special smile for “possibles” was there, it was instinctive rather than reasoned. All that she wanted at this moment was news—news of Mark.

She was often amused by her mother’s ways; sometimes ashamed of them; sometimes distressed by them.

Other suitors, upon whom her mother had smiled, had been embarrassed by that championship; Mark appeared to depend on it as much as on his own attractions; great though he thought these to be.

Mrs. Norbury recognized at once that Antony was likely to be the more sympathetic listener; and when tea was over, and Bill and Angela had been dispatched to the garden with the promptness and efficiency of the expert, dear Mr. Gillingham found himself on the sofa beside her, listening to many things which were of even greater interest to him than she could possibly have hoped.

“Of course, yes, I was forgetting. But, believe me, Mr. Gillingham, you can trust a woman’s intuition in these matters.”

“I never liked him, never!” “Never liked——?” said Antony, bewildered. “That cousin of his—Mr. Cayley.”

“I ask you, Mr. Gillingham, am I the sort of woman to trust my little girl to a man who would go about shooting his only brother?”

“If there has been any shooting done, it has been done by somebody else.”

“I never liked him,” said Mrs. Norbury firmly. “Never.” However, thought Antony to himself, that didn’t quite prove that Cayley was a murderer.

“Girls are so foolish, Mr. Gillingham,” she was saying. “It is fortunate that they have mothers to guide them.”

“Such a gentleman. So nice-looking, in his artistic way. A regular Velasquez—I should say Van Dyck.”

“Oh, no! There is such a thing, Mr. Gillingham, as being too devoted a lover.