The Intrusions of Peggy

Publisher Marketing: The changeful April morning that she watched from the window of her flat looking over the river began a day of significance in the career of Trix Trevalla-of feminine significance, almost milliner's perhaps, but of significance all the same. She had put off her widow's weeds, and for the first time these three years back was dressed in a soft shade of blue; the harmony of her eyes and the gleams of her brown hair welcomed the colour with the cordiality of an old friendship happily renewed. Mrs. Trevalla's maid had been all in a flutter over the momentous transformation; in her mistress it bred a quietly retrospective mood. As she lay in an armchair watching the water and the clouds, she turned back on the course of her life, remembering many things. The beginning of a new era brought the old before her eyes in a protesting flash of vividness. She abandoned herself to recollections-an insidious form of dissipating the mind, which goes well with a relaxed ease of the body. Not that Mrs. Trevalla's recollections were calculated to promote a sense of luxury, unless indeed they were to act as a provocative contrast. There was childhood, spent in a whirling succession of lodging-houses. They had little individuality and retained hardly any separate identity; each had consisted of two rooms with folding doors between, and somewhere, at the back or on the floor above, a cupboard for her to sleep in. There was the first baby, her brother, who died when she was six; he had been a helpless, clinging child, incapable of living without far more sympathy and encouragement than he had ever got. Luckily she had been of hardier stuff. There was her mother, a bridling, blushing, weak-kneed woman (Trix's memory was candid); kind save when her nerves were bad, and when they were, unkind in a weak and desultory fashion that did not deserve the name of cruelty. Trix had always felt less anger than contempt for her half-hysterical outbursts, and bore no malice on their account. This pale visitor soon faded-as indeed Mrs. Trevalla herself had-into non-existence, and 8 a different picture took its place. Here was the Reverend Algernon, her father, explaining that he found himself unsuited to pastoral work and indisposed to adopt any other active calling, that inadequate means were a misfortune, not a fault, that a man must follow his temperament, and that he asked only to be allowed to go his own way-he did not add to pay it-in peace and quiet. His utterances came back with the old distinction of manner and the distant politeness with which Mr. Trevalla bore himself towards all disagreeable incidents of life-under which head there was much reason to surmise that he ranked his daughter. Contributor Bio:  Hope, Anthony Anthony Hope (Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins) was an English writer and playwright. Best known for his classic adventure tales The Prisoner of Zenda and Rupert of Hentzau, Hope is credited with creating the Ruritanian romance genre. Although he originally published short pieces in popular periodicals, Hope started his own publishing press because of a lack of interest in publishing his longer works. The success of The Prisoner of Zenda allowed him to give up his career in law in favour of writing full time, but his later works never achieved the same popularity as Zenda. Hope was knighted in 1918 in recognition of his work with wartime propaganda, and he continued to write steadily until his death from cancer in 1933.