A Fair Barbarian

A Fair Barbarian

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Title: A Fair Barbarian
Author: Francis Hodgson Burnett
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A FAIR BARBARIAN
BY FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
1881

CONTENTS


CHAPTER
I. MISS OCTAVIA BASSETT
II. "AN INVESTMENT, ANYWAY"
III. L'ARGENTVILLE
IV. LADY THEOBALD
V. LUCIA
VI. ACCIDENTAL
VII. "I SHOULD LIKE TO SEE MORE OF SLOWBRIDGE"
VIII. SHARES LOOKING UP
IX. WHITE MUSLIN

X. ANNOUNCING MR. BAROLD
XI. A SLIGHT INDISCRETION
XII. AN INVITATION
XIII. INTENTIONS
XIV. A CLERICAL VISIT
XV. SUPERIOR ADVANTAGES
XVI. CROQUET
XVII. ADVANTAGES
XVIII. CONTRAST
XIX. AN EXPERIMENT
XX. PECULIAR TO NEVADA
XXI. LORD LANSDOWNE
XXII. "YOU HAVE MADE IT LIVELIER"
XXIII. "MAY I GO?"
XXIV. THE GARDEN PARTY
XXV. "SOMEBODY ELSE"
XXVI. "JACK"

A FAIR BARBARIAN.

CHAPTER I.
MISS OCTAVIA BASSETT.
Slowbridge had been shaken to its foundations.
It may as well be explained, however, at the outset, that it would not
take much of a sensation to give Slowbridge a great shock. In the first
place, Slowbridge was not used to sensations, and was used to going on
the even and respectable tenor of its way, regarding the outside world
with private distrust, if not with open disfavor. The new mills had been
a trial to Slowbridge,--a sore trial. On being told of the owners' plan of
building them, old Lady Theobald, who was the corner-stone of the
social edifice of Slowbridge, was said, by a spectator, to have turned
deathly pale with rage; and, on the first day of their being opened in
working order, she had taken to her bed, and remained shut up in her
darkened room for a week, refusing to see anybody, and even going so
far as to send a scathing message to the curate of St. James, who called
in fear and trembling, because he was afraid to stay away.
"With mills and mill-hands," her ladyship announced to Mr. Laurence,
the mill-owner, when chance first threw them together, "with mills and
mill-hands come murder, massacre, and mob law." And she said it so
loud, and with so stern an air of conviction, that the two Misses
Briarton, who were of a timorous and fearful nature, dropped their
buttered muffins (it was at one of the tea-parties which were
Slowbridge's only dissipation), and shuddered hysterically, feeling that
their fate was sealed, and that they might, any night, find three
masculine mill-hands secreted under their beds, with bludgeons. But as
no massacres took place, and the mill-hands were pretty regular in their
habits, and even went so far as to send their children to Lady
Theobald's free school, and accepted the tracts left weekly at their
doors, whether they could read or not, Slowbridge gradually recovered
from the shock of finding itself forced to exist in close proximity to
mills, and was just settling itself to sleep--the sleep of the just--again,
when, as I have said, it was shaken to its foundations.

It was Miss Belinda Bassett who received the first shock. Miss Belinda
Bassett was a decorous little maiden lady, who lived in a decorous little
house on High Street (which was considered a very genteel street in
Slowbridge). She had lived in the same house all her life, her father had
lived in it, and so also had her grandfather. She had gone out, to take
tea, from its doors two or three times a week, ever since she had been
twenty; and she had had her little tea-parties in its front parlor as often
as any other genteel Slowbridge entertainer. She had risen at seven,
breakfasted at eight, dined at two, taken tea