“Mrs. Frederick was offended with Providence for sending a rainy day when she wanted to go to a picnic, so she ate her breakfast in a sulky silence”
Not Mrs. Fredrick Stirling giving God the silent treatment because he fucked up the weather. 😂😂😂
Amelia Wansbarra was an arranging woman, recognized all through Deerwood and beyond as an excellent manager. She managed things for her father until she came to an understanding that inevitably becoming the surviving spinster daughter of such an eccentric man would not be an agreeable life. Looking around her, she set her sights on the most tractable of the Stirling brothers, and she managed to marry him, despite the family’s coolness to her less-than-sterling background. Stirlings married money or kept it tightly bound to the Stirling clan. She managed her husband’s household and her pin money with unimpeachable economy, and she managed to rise in the esteem of her husband’s family through her faultless doctrine and unexceptionably correct conduct. She managed to become pregnant within a seemly interval of the wedding, and the Stirlings warmed to her a little more, anticipating, in their oblique discussion of the likely issue, that Stirling characteristics somewhat lacking in Frederick might be bolstered in his son. But Amelia’s management did not extend as far as the product of that interesting event, and Frederick’s expectation of the triumphant arrival of George Albert Stirling came to nothing. In the face of his son-in-law and daughter’s lack of preparation, Amos Wansbarra gave his granddaughter a name and a sum of money of her own, which neither her mother nor Stirlings could draw. After choking down the bitterness, Amelia lifted her chin and managed more rigorously, resolved that there would not be a second failure. She instinctively understood the need to recover her footing after the setback. She managed the household accounts with a zealous thrift that reduced expenses despite the addition of a third to the family. She managed the family’s health and home life by the advice of the best authorities, without wasteful indulgence or excesses that precede moral and physical weakness. She managed to convince herself that a cold, damp house was a virtue of commendable thrift, leading to her second humiliatingly public failure of management: managing to become a widow.
