Second Thoughts

by Rhoda Broughton

CONTENTS: PART 1. FIRST THOUGHTS PART 2. SECOND THOUGHTS PART 3. SECOND THOUGHTS ARE BEST ***an excerpt from: PART 1. FIRST THOUGHTS - Chapter 1 There is no truer proverb than the one that tells us that "A watched pot never boils;" and yet, though they have all been watching, with their eyes upon the dial-plate, for the clock to strike midnight, it has struck at last. Instantly there is a rising, a rustling, a cheerful moving. Through the door of communication they pass---men, women, and children---from the sleepy, warm arm-chairs of the drawing-room into the chill semi-obscurity of the unfurnished, echoing gallery, which for the last twenty years has served for the romp-place, dance- place, wet-day-place, litter-place, of the Marlowe family. Along the floor, upon the bare boards, each parted from the other by an interval of about a yard, stand twelve bedroom candles, which a stooping footman is in the act of lighting. Over these twelve consecutive candles the Squire; his two half-grown daughters, Jane and Emilia; his ungrown son, little Dick; his full-grown niece, the mistress of his widowed household, Gillian Latimer, and all his guests in order due, are about to leap. Over twelve such candles the young Marlowes, ever since their little legs have put on the functions of such, have been yearly wont to jump as soon as the strike of clock, the ring of bell, the voice of Christmas wait, have told them that the moment has come for discovering by this simplest form of divination the fortunes of the coming year. "If you clear them all," cries Jane, in a high bustling voice of excited explanation to an alien young man---Jane, whose own length of adolescent leg fits her for a nobler stride---"If you clear them all, you will be lucky all the year; if you put out any one, you will be unlucky in that month of the year to which it corresponds; if you put out the first, you will be unlucky in January, the second in February, and so on." "And though," says Gillian, gaily, wrapping the while, with house-motherly precaution, a woolly shawl round the shoulders of Emilia, who has sneezed---"and though the event has never once fulfilled the prediction, our faith remains absolutely unshaken." "And if you put them all out?" says the young man in a melancholy voice, eyeing the candle-flames with an absent, poet's eye. He is a long, fragile, young man, slender as any reed, and with legs even more spidery than Jane's, though, unlike hers, they give no idea less than that of jumping. If you were a good motherly soul, with healthy red and white boys of your own, you would probably say, "Poor fellow! how thin he is! I should like to feed him up!" But you had better not let him hear the wish. What would a young gentleman, gnawed upon by the Weltschmerz, a vowed votary of Our Lady of Pain, do with gross flesh and unæsthetic fibre? Far, far liever would he be lying in his narrow poet grave, with the Seamews screeching above him, and the Bitter Bright Sea Mother singing him an amorous salt lullaby, as in several of his minor poems he has already affectingly described himself. "And if you put them all out?" says the young man.....

274 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1880

About the author

Rhoda Broughton was a popular British (Welsh) novelist and short story writer.