Читать книгу Period Piece - Gwendolyn Raverat - Страница 11

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So they were married in the summer of 1884, at Erie, Pennsylvania; where the local paper described my mother as 'a Philadelphia belle of the first water'. And on the whole they were very happy. My mother's calmness, good spirits and unshakable courage were very soothing to my father's overstrung nerves; and in all the more important things she submitted her strong will to his better judgment. She was always kind and sympathetic to him when he was ill, and took his ailments perfectly seriously; but, unlike a Darwin, she did not positively enjoy his ill-health; she would really have preferred him to be well; and as a consequence he did get very much better. Perhaps, in some ways, she might have been happier with a younger, stronger, gayer man; and he with someone nearer his own intellectual level; but on both sides there were compensations, which made up for what was lacking.

That first winter of 1884-5 they rented the Jebbs' house, Springfield, while the Jebbs spent the winter in Glasgow; and they then began to look for a house of their own. They first made an offer, through a friend, for the house so recently acquired by Mr. T. This strikes me as rather tactless; at any rate Mr. T. seemed determined not to lose his house as well as his lady, for he answered that he was going to live there himself. Aunt Cara writes, in unconscious rhyme: 'He will think a wife is easier to find, than another house so exactly to his mind.'