A Winnowing Author:Robert Hugh Benson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II 44T THINK Jack must have gone perfectly mad," said Mary, almost hysterically, to her friend Lady Sarah. " Tell me all over again, clearly an... more »d distinctly," said the girl. The two were sitting together in the morning- room on the evening of the third day. It had just gone six; and Lady Sarah had been contemplating a move homewards to her house a mile beyond the village. But after a long silence, broken only by obvious attempts to be conversational, Mary had suddenly burst out into such a torrent of incoherent information that a departure was impossible. (Jack, by the way, was doing excellently: that fact had emerged at an earlier point. He was even in his dressing-gown upstairs before a small fire, as the evening was chilly.) Mary sat down again abruptly on the low, wide window-seat, snatched a blind tassel, and staring desolately out over the box-lined beds in front towhere the upper lawns rose to the fringe of the park, began her story. " Well, the first kind of things I didn't mind. I mean things like asking Father Banting to come and live here. I think it's a bore, but — but there it is. Some Catholics do do it, and it's Jack's house after all. Besides, he'll be safely tucked away in the chapel-wing, anyhow. And I didn't much mind that — that ridiculous notice that was given out in church. (My dear! It was awful. You could have heard the tenants shiver. I thought I couldn't ever look Parkinson in the face again.) But I suppose he can do all that if he wants. But it's the other thing — the thing he asked me this morning — that's finished me." " Tell me again," said Lady Sarah patiently. (She was thinking that husbands had their disadvantages after all.) "Well, it was this. (Don't laugh, please.) Jack has been hunting up things in books. I never...« less