Anthony Trollope: Barchester Towers

28. CHAPTER XXVIII: MRS BOLD IS ENTERTAINED BY DR AND MRS GRANTLY AT PLUMSTEAD (continued)

Eleanor, when she received the letter from her father's hand, had no idea from whom it came. She had never seen Mr Slope's handwriting, or if so, had forgotten it; and did not think of him as she twisted the letter as people do twist letters when they do not immediately recognise their correspondents either by the writing or the seal. She was sitting at her glass brushing her hair, and rising every other minute to play with her boy who was sprawling on the bed, and who engaged pretty nearly the whole attention of the maid as well as of the mother.

At last, sitting before her toilet table, she broke the seal, and turning over the leaf saw Mr Slope's name. She first felt surprised, and then annoyed, and then anxious. As she read it she became interested. She was so delighted to find that all obstacles to her father's return to the hospital were apparently removed that she did not observe the fulsome language in which the tidings were conveyed. She merely perceived that she was commissioned to tell her father that such was the case, and she did not realise the fact that such a commission should not have been made, in the first instance, to her by an unmarried young clergyman. She felt, on the whole, grateful to Mr Slope, and anxious to get on her dress that she might run with the news to her father. Then she came to the allusion to her own pious labours, and she said in her heart that Mr Slope was an affected ass. Then she went on again and was offended by her boy being called Mr Slope's darling--he was nobody's darling but her own; or at any rate not the darling of a disagreeable stranger like Mr Slope. Lastly she arrived at the tresses and felt a qualm of disgust. She looked up in the glass, and there they were before her, long and silken, certainly, and very beautiful. I will not say but that she knew them to be so, but she felt angry with them and brushed them roughly and carelessly. She crumpled the letter with angry violence, and resolved, almost without thinking of it, that she would not show it to her father. She would merely tell him the contents of it. She then comforted herself again with her boy, and her dress fastened, she went down to dinner.