The Pursuit of Love Read Online Free

the baying slavering creatures caught up with us, to be rewarded with lumps of meat and many caresses. Uncle Matthew was in a radiantly good temper, he got off his horse and walked home with us, chatting agreeably. What was most unusual, he was even quite affable to me.
    ‘I hear Brenda has died,’ he said. ‘No great loss I should say. That mouse stank like merry hell. I expect you kept her cage too near the radiator, I always told you it was unhealthy, or did she die of old age?’
    Uncle Matthew’s charm, when he chose to turn it on, was considerable, but at that time I was always mortally afraid of him, and made the mistake of letting him see that I was.
    ‘You ought to have a dormouse, Fanny, or a rat. They are much more interesting than white mice-though I must frankly say, of all the mice I ever knew, Brenda was the most utterly dismal.’
    ‘She was dull,’ I said, sycophantically.
    ‘When I go to London after Christmas, I’ll get you a dormouse. Saw one the other day at the Army & Navy.’
    ‘Oh Fa, it
is
unfair,’ said Linda, who was walking her pony along beside us. ‘You know how I’ve always longed for a dormouse.’
    ‘It is unfair’ was a perpetual cry of the Radletts when young. The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life’s essential unfairness. With them I must say it nearly always operated in favour of Linda, who was the adored of Uncle Matthew.
    To-day, however, my uncle was angry with her, and I saw in a flash that this affability to me, this genial chat about mice, was simply designed as a tease for her.
    ‘You’ve got enough animals, miss,’ he said, sharply. ‘You can’t control the ones you have got. And don’t forget what I told you – that dog of yours goes straight to the kennel when we get back, and stays there.’
    Linda’s face crumpled, tears poured, she kicked her pony into a canter and made for home. It seemed that her dog Labby had been sick in Uncle Matthew’s business-room after breakfast. Uncle Matthew was unable to bear dirtiness in dogs, he flew into a rage, and, in his rage, had made a rule that never again was Labby to set foot in the house. This was always happening, for one reason or another, to one animal or another, and, Uncle Matthew’s bark being invariably much worse than his bite, the ban seldom lasted more than a day or two, after which would begin what he called the Thin End of the Wedge.
    ‘Can I bring him in just while I fetch my gloves?’
    ‘I’m so tired – I can’t go to the stables – do let him stay just till after tea.’
    ‘Oh, I see – the thin end of the wedge. All right, this time he can stay, but if he makes another mess – or I catch him on your bed – or he chews up the good furniture (according to whichever crime it was that had resulted in banishment), I’ll have him destroyed, and don’t say I didn’t warn you.’
    All the same, every time sentence of banishment was pronounced, the owner of the condemned would envisage her beloved moping his life away in the solitary confinements of a cold and gloomy kennel.
    ‘Even if I take him out for three hours every day, and go and chat to him for another hour, that leaves twenty hours for him all alone with nothing to do. Oh, why can’t dogs read?’
    The Radlett children, it will be observed, took a highly anthropomorphic view of their pets.
    To-day, however, Uncle Matthew was in a wonderfully good temper, and, as we left the stables, he said to Linda, who was sitting crying with Labby in his kennel:
    ‘Are you going to leave that poor brute of yours in there all day?’
    Her tears forgotten as if they had never been, Linda rushed into the house with Labby at her heels. The Radletts were always either on a peak of happiness or drowning in black waters of despair; their emotions were on no ordinary plane, they loved or they loathed, they laughed or they cried, they lived in a world of superlatives. Their life with Uncle Matthew was a sort of