A princess of Thule a novel Author:William Black Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. TRANSFORMATION. Had she, then, Lavender could not help asking himself, a bad temper, or any other qualities or characteristics which were appa... more »rent to other people but not to him ? Was it possible that, after all, Ingram was right; and that he had yet to learn the nature of the girl he had married ? It would be unfair to say that he suspected something wrong about his wife—that he fancied she had managed to conceal something— merely because Mrs. Lavender had said that Sheila had a bad temper; but here was another person who maintained that, when the days of his romance were over, he would see the girl in another light. Nay, as he continued to ask himself, had not the change already begun ? He grew less and less accustomed to see ill Sheila a beautiful wild sea-bird that had fluttered down, for a time, into a strange home in the South. He had not quite forgotten or abandoned those imaginative scenes in which the wonderful Sea-Princess was to enter crowded drawing-rooms and have all the world standing back to regard her and admire her, and sing her praises. But now he was not so sure that that would be the result of Sheila's entrance into society. As the date of a certain small dinner-party drew near, he began to wish she was more like the women he knew. He did not object to her strange sweet ways of speech, nor to her odd likes and dislikes, nor even to an unhesitating frankness that nearly approached rudeness sometimes in its scorn of all compromise with the truth; but how would others regard these things? He did not wish to gain the reputation of having married an oddity. " Sheila," he said, on the morning of the day on which they were going to this dinner-party, " you should not say like-a-ness. There are only two syllables in likeness. It really does ...« less