The Ordeal of Elizabeth — Elizabeth Von Arnim

Chapter 1.The Van Vorst Homestead stands close to the road-side; a dark, low-built, gloomy old place. The horse-shoe on the door, testifies to its age, and the devout superstition of the Van Vorst who built it. However effectual against witches, the horse-shoe cannot be said to have brought much luck otherwise. The Van Vorsts who lived there, a junior branch of the old colonial house, did not prosper in worldly matters, but sank more and more as time went on, in general respect and consideration.There was a break in the deterioration, and apparently a revival of old glories, when Peter Van Vorst married his cousin, a brilliant beauty from town, who had refused, as tradition asserts, half the eligible men of her day, and accepted Peter for what seemed a sudden and mysterious caprice. The marriage was a nine days’ wonder; but whatever the reasons that prompted her strange choice--whether love, indifference, or some feeling more complicated and subtle; Elizabeth Van Vorst made no effort to avert its consequences, but settled down in silence to a life of monotonous poverty. She did not even try, as less favored women have done under harder circumstances, to keep in touch with the world she had given up. She never wrote to her old friends, never recalled herself, by her presence in town, to her former admirers. As for the Homestead, it wore, under the inert indifference of her rule, the same neglected look which had prevailed for years. The foliage grew in rank profusion about the house till it shut out not only the sunlight, but all view of the river. Perhaps Madam Van Vorst, as people called her, disliked the idea of change; or perhaps she grudged the cost of a day’s labor to cut the trees; or it might be that she liked the gloom and the feeling of confinement, and had no desire to feast her eyes on the river, after the fashion of the Neighborhood. It reminded her too much, perhaps, of the outside world.(Continued...)