Friendship and Folly: The Merriweather Chronicles Book I by Meredith Allady

drawing room and, braving maternal disdain and retribution, announced her resolve to have nothing to do with an affair conceived in selfishness, and brought forth in deceit. Or perhaps her delicate, heroine-like sensibilities would have succumbed to the horror of her dilemma, and in doing so delivered her from it, by causing her to fall into a decline, or become completely distracted.
    But Ann was not a heroine; in the reading of plays, she was ever (and gladly) cast as Celia to Rosalind, Hero to Beatrice; the faithful confidant who passed messages, diverted duennas, and went sympathetically mad in white linen. She therefore did nothing at all, but feel very low in spirits, and reflect at length on the trouble a person could bring on her friends, without in the least meaning to do so.
    **

Chapter VII

    It was as well that the Parrys did not make a practice of trimming their sails to suit their neighbors, for on this occasion the winds of opinion blew with such severity, in such wholly opposite directions, that any attempt to accommodate them could have led to nothing but a vast snarl of ropes and canvas.
    There were the cool, censorious breezes led by Mrs. Northcott, who denounced Julia’s “coming out en famille ,” and cast up their eyes when it became known that the Parrys expected to attend as many lectures as balls, and displayed more eagerness at the prospect of dining with their old friends from Clapham, than of nibbling on lobster patties in Willis’s Rooms. And opposed to these were the fewer, but more impassioned gusts of those who perceived the entire business to be a Fatal Compromise With The World, brought about by an Insidious Erosion of Principle. These faithful, alarmed souls, borne along by a sense of duty, were emboldened to speak with greater freedom than their opponents, and swept with earnest haste upon the imperiled couple, in person and epistle.
    Mr. Parry had an excellent stomach for this sort of tempest, and merely found it tedious when gentlemen with whom he was more wont to discuss the methods of Walton or the letters of Newton insisted on “speaking as a friend” to him in his library; but Lady Frances, her own heart more than half in sympathy with the alarms of her callers, was rather troubled, until Mr. Parry advised her to refer all complaints to him. “Tell your visitors,” said he, “that your husband is a domestic tyrant, who forbids you to agitate yourself by listening to their disapproval of how we choose to deal with our children.” Whether she did so, or whether the critics sensed, as critics occasionally do, that the one whom they have been attacking has suddenly become equipped to reply to them in a way that must put them to rout, and withdrew of their own accord, was something only Lady Frances knew.
    The last evidence of opposition they received, was that of a favorite aunt, less than a week before they were to depart from Merriweather. She wrote, in passionate and nearly illegible criss-crosses, that by taking Julia up to London, they were “deliberately tossing their daughter into a voracious whirl of petty Nothingness, in which the interests of true health are disregarded in an attempt to obey Fashion’s arbitrary decree, that every body must be acquainted with every body, together with that consequent, authoritative, but rather inconvenient clause that every body must go every where every night.”
    There was a great deal more in this vein. Lady Frances, who had, influenced especially by the excitement of the younger girls, begun almost to look on the journey with complacency, was disquieted once more by doubts. Mr. Parry was annoyed. He took the letter, which she had been reading aloud, from her hand, and saying, “I will save you the trouble of replying, my dear: you may write this down as I go,” began to address it thus:
     
    “My Dear Madam,
     
    “Fashion, like her ador’d sister Pleasure, ‘that reeling goddess of the zoneless waist,’ is a mere synthetic