Aunt Crete's Emancipation / Beggarman by Grace Livingston Hill

It was one of the family grievances that Luella was stout like her aunt instead of tall and slender like her mother. Luella, a rather stout young woman in stylish attire, with her mother’s keen features unsoftened by sentiment, advanced, irreverently tearing open her mother’s telegram and reading it as she came. Wasn’t there anything to pay? Who is it for? Nonsense, Crete, you always act like such a baby.

I’m sure I don’t know, Carrie, said Lucretia apprehensively, but I’m all of a tremble. Her sister could easily look over her head into the hall, and her gaze was penetrative and alert. Lucretia was short and dumpy, with the comfortable, patient look of the maiden aunt that knows she is indispensable because she will meekly take all the burdens that no one else wants to bear. Who would telegraph now that Hannah’s dead? It couldn’t be, Crete, said Luella’s mother impatiently, coming to see for herself.

Luella’s gone to the door, said her sister from her vantage-point at the crack of the sitting-room door.

Who’s at the front door? asked Luella’s mother, coming in from the kitchen with a dishtowel in her hand. Read moreĬopyright © 2018 Classica Libris Chapter 1 A TELEGRAM AND A FLIGHT Donald takes her traveling elsewhere, and she never returns to the women who mistreated her.Īunt Crete’s Emancipation is a very innocent and sweet story of a long list of wrongs set right that keeps readers of all ages enraptured. When they finally recognize her, they try to order Aunt Crete to leave before she “embarrasses” them. At first, they believe Aunt Crete must be rich and famous because she seems to have the best of everything and makes friends with the family of the young man Luella has her heart set on. Donald is well-educated and rich, and loves Aunt Crete like a mother, taking her shopping for fancy clothes and paying for French maids to fix up her hair, and then to the very resort where Luella and Carrie are staying. Upon learning that Donald, the son of their now-deceased older sister, is coming to visit from out west, Luella fears what others will think of them if they are seen with a “backwoods cousin,” so she and her mother hurry away to a fancy resort where Luella is anxious to pursue a young man she is convinced is interested in her, which proves to be all in her head. Lucretia “Crete” Ward is a nice old lady who lives with her sister Carrie and niece Luella, both of whom are very selfish and treat her like a slave. This story is a Grace Livingston Hill rarity, in which the main character does not find a husband/wife at the end of the story.

Aunt Crete's Emancipation / Beggarman by Grace Livingston Hill