However, I agreed to go.
"Ah! capital--very nice quiet walk, and convenient for me--very little out
of my way home. I'll walk there with you."
"One word for your neighbour and two for yourself," thought I; but on
we walked. To see good pictures had been a long cherished hope of mine.
Everything beautiful in form or colour was beginning of late to have an
intense fascination for me. I had, now that I was emancipated, gradually
dared to feed my greedy eyes by passing stares into the print-shop windows,
and had learnt from them a thousand new notions, new emotions, new longings
after beauties of Nature, which seemed destined never to be satisfied. But
pictures, above all, foreign ones, had been in my mother's eyes, Anathema
Maranatha, as vile Popish and Pagan vanities, the rags of the scarlet woman
no less than the surplice itself--and now, when it came to the point, I
hesitated at an act of such awful disobedience, even though unknown to
her. My cousin, however, laughed down my scruples, told me I was out of
leading-strings now, and, which was true enough, that it was "a * * * *
deal better to amuse oneself in picture galleries without leave, than live
a life of sneaking and lying under petticoat government, as all home-birds
were sure to do in the long-run.
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