Cloudy Jewel: The Cloudening
I hate this new livejournal "have to scroll on right-hand side" stuff but since all LJ does nowadays is farm hate and fail...
It happened that Miss Myrtle Villers had not confined her affections to Mr. Bartram Laws. She had been seen wandering about the campus with other youths at odd hours of the evening when young-lady students were supposed to be safely within college halls or properly chaperoned at some public gathering.
Every so often GLH pops off with some detail from another world, this being one. The sexist double standard built in here makes a little sense during the days of no access to abortion or birth control, but it sounds a bit like the college thinks perhaps they should have their heads covered too and not be allowed anywhere without a husband or male relative. And maybe a prohibition on driving.
The “student exec” had had her in tow for several weeks, and she had already received a number of reproofs and warnings. A daring escapade the evening before had brought matters to a head,
We will never find out what it was, although perhaps when she is going about alone with strange boys past curfew, perhaps that is all GLH dared suggest.
However that was, when the executive body in consultation with the dean sent for her, they traced her to the Clouds’ house. At least, they came there about seven o’clock to inquire and hoping to take her unaware. They had found Allison in a great state of excitement, telephoning hither and yon to try to get some clew to his sister’s whereabouts. They had remained to advise and suggest, greatly worried at the whole situation, the more so because it involved Leslie Cloud, whose bright presence had taken great hold upon everybody.
So that is why the dean was there.
And now, without knowing it, Leslie Cloud had taken the one way to put the whole matter into the right hands and to exonerate herself. If she had known that any member of the faculty was in that room listening, if she had dreamed that even her brother was there, she would not have thought it right or honorable to put even an enemy in such a position, either for her own sake or for the girl’s.
Also kidnapping and interrogating her at gunpoint might have gone past the bounds.
She had only wanted some wise, true adviser to know the truth, so that the girl might learn what was right and have the responsibility taken from her own shoulders. She thought, too, that she had a right to be exonerated before her aunt. So now, while she wept out her contrition in Julia Cloud’s arms, retribution was coming swiftly to Myrtle Villers; and her career in that college was sealed with finality. It was only too plain that such a girl was a menace
such a girl was a menace
SUCH A GIRL WAS A MENACE
Thanks for noticing, mister dean.
Presently Leslie, feeling something strange in the atmosphere, lifted frightened, tear-filled eyes, and saw the grave faces of the dean and his companions! She held her breath with suspense. How terrible! How public and unseemly! She had brought all this upon herself and her family by her persistent friendship with this silly girl! And she fell to trembling and shuddering, all her fine, sweet nerve gone now that the strain was over.
The gun is still over there on the table, so if the dean strains her anymore he may become a colander.
Presently the dean and his committee were gone, taking the cowering Myrtle with them, and Leslie lay snuggled up on the couch, with Allison building up the fire and Cherry bringing a tray with a nice supper.
Thus passes Myrtle from the book, which makes a lot of sense since she just got expelled. And HI CHERRY! I bet she cooked that, Cherry is awesome. The in-depth readings for Elsie Dinsmore were kind of scarring, since a black person in a period chick-lit piece is now an automatic cringe-inducer. We never see Cherry take the front stage again, but her little mentions are always positive.
It's not really progressive because she's a minor character who's a house-servant, but this is one novel where her presence is just as a person who happens to be there, working and getting paid. Plus I can imagine her in her pleasant room. Leaving her for now, Allison is telling Leslie:
"She was headed straight for a bad end, and no mistake. All the fellows knew it, and the faculty suspected it; and it was making no end of trouble. But now the girl may be saved, for that dean never lets a student go to destruction, they say, if he can help it. Oh, of course he’ll fire her. She isn’t fit to be around here. But he’ll keep an eye on her, and he’ll fire her in such a way that she’ll have another chance to make good if she’s willing to take it."
How he's going to influence and watch her and fire her and expel her and give her another chance all at once is never disclosed. Perhaps the dean is also some kind of angel, if a more masculine, paternal one.
“He smelled of liquor; and he had great, coarse lips and eyes; and he put his arms around her, and kissed her right there before us all; and they acted perfectly disgusting! I’m almost sure from things I heard them say that she hadn’t been engaged to him at all, she hadn’t even known him till last week. She met him in town--just picked him up on the street! And that Fred Hicks! I don’t believe now he was her cousin at all.”
Not the fizziest little soda on the counter, that Leslie.
Allison seemed quite satisfied with these sentiments, and they had a beautiful time eating their supper before the fire, for no one had had any appetite before; and Cherry was as pleased to have the anxiety over and wait upon them all as if Leslie had been her own sister.
HI CHERRY hold it, how is she as pleased to wait on Leslie as if Leslie had been her own sister? Does she ever tell her sister to refill her own damn glass?
Into the midst of their little family group broke a hurried, excited knock on the door, and there stood Howard Letchworth with anxious face.
“I heard that your sister and one of the college girls had gone off in a car and got lost. Is it true? I came right around to see if I could help.”
"Howard Letchworth" is just terrible. It is below Bromly Egerton on the Terrible Hero Name Choices scale, if above George Prescott Godhelpus Benedict. Either the other students think so too and have brushed him off, or those two student council kids have been persuaded not to tell the most interesting eyewitness story of their lives. Or perhaps there is a third option.
“I know who that Laws fellow is,” he said gravely. “He’s rotten! And I shouldn’t wonder if I could locate his friend. I get around quite a bit on my motor-cycle. May I use your ’phone a minute? I have a friend who is a detective. They ought to be rounded up. Miss Leslie, would you tell me carefully just what roads you took, as nearly as you know?”
Howard found Leslie's house after handling her necklace. He also showed up immediately after she was in trouble. This 'detective friend' thing is a cover, he is a psychic and he just needs a moment to secretly inform the cops of their location.
There was the same look in Howard Letchworth’s eyes when he looked at Leslie, the age-old beauty of a man’s clean devotion to a sweet, pure woman soul.
Howard Letchworth. Oh god. So they all hang out, talk about Christian Endeavor, and have a little music time. No dancing, just playing and singing hymns.
Howard Letchworth had been most thoughtful about the matter in the village, and had managed so that the tragic had been taken out of the story that had started to roll about, and Leslie could go around and not feel that all eyes were upon her wondering about her escapade.
Oh, the dean gets no credit for gagging those two students and propagating the story Howard first heard.
Life goes back to normal, since they probably stopped telling Leslie where the gun was stored. Julia Cloud's reality-warping field spreads further and further.
“It is our time when we catch up in our loving for all the week,” Leslie explained with a quaint smile to one girl who broadly hinted that she would not mind being asked for over Sunday. “And, besides, you mightn’t like the way we keep Sunday. Everybody who comes has to go to church and Christian Endeavor with us, and enjoy our Bible-reading, singing hour around the fire; and I didn’t think you would.”
“Well, I like your nerve!” answered the girl; but she sat studying Leslie afterwards with a thoughtful gaze, and began to wonder whether, after all, a Sunday spent in that way might not be really interesting.
I don't know what to make of "catch up in our loving." It won't be the sixties for about forty years, and it sounds like they procrastinate love the rest of the time.
Oh, how those college-fed boys and girls enjoyed these picnics, with Julia Cloud as a kind of hovering angel to minister with word or smile or in some more practical way, wherever there was need! They all called her “Cloudy Jewel” now whenever they dared, and envied those who got closest to her and told her their troubles. Many a lad or lassie brought her his or her perplexities; and often as they sat around the winter camp, perhaps on a rock brushed free from snow, she gave them sage advice wrapped up in pleasant stories that were brought in ever so incidentally.
THANK YOU. Finally Julia as angel is made explicit after chapter after chapter of miraculous, excessively improbable reforming of all she touches. And I like her stories. It's like Miss Marple with comparisons of whatever just happened in St. Mary Mead, only without the murder.
And sometimes, as they walked homeward through the twilight of a long, happy afternoon, and the streaks of crimson were beginning to glow in the gray of the horizon, some one or two would lag behind and ask her deep, sweet questions about life and its meaning and its hereafter.
Then she met a philosophy student and they froze to death.
Often they showed her their hearts as they had never shown them even to their own people, and often a word with her sent some student back to work harder and fight stronger against some subtle temptation.
I'm waiting for the part where the students unanimously ban dancing on campus.
She became a wholesome antidote to the spirit of doubt and atheism that had crept stealthily into the college and was attacking so many and undermining what little faith in religion they had when they came there.
Oh, please. She has palpitations and agonies whenever the junior Clouds think bad thoughts. If anyone expressed atheism in her presence she'd die on the spot.
At the close of such an evening it was not an uncommon happening for a crowd of the frat boys to gather in a knot in front of the house and give the college yell, with a tiger at the end, and then “CLOUD! CLOUD! CLOUD!” The people living on that street got used to it, and opened their windows to listen, with eyes tender and thoughtful as they pondered on how easily this little family had caught the hearts of those college people, and were helping them to have a good time.
Then they would scream "SHUT THE HELL UP!" and bang their windows down. Honestly, some of her actual romances aren't such improbable wish fulfillment.
There is more about the Christian Endeavor and how it is bringing the humble village kids and the college kids together, but I'm getting cavities and I'm going to hunt for more interesting bits. What was the run-down on interest? Conflicts resolved, no kidnapings on the horizon, the nosy neighbor and Ellen left back at home-
“For mercy’s sake, Julia, what a queer house you’ve got!” said Ellen the minute she arrived, gazing disapprovingly at the many windows and the brick terrace. “I should think ’twould take all your time to keep clean. What’s the idea in making a sidewalk of your front porch? Looks as if some crazy person had built it. Couldn’t you find anything better than this in the town? I saw some real pretty frame houses with gardens as we came through.”
Oh. That'll do.
“We like this very well,” said Julia Cloud with her old patient smile and the hurt flush that always accompanied her answers to her sister’s contempt. “Cherry doesn’t seem to mind washing windows. She likes to keep them bright."
Ellen offers to keep going if they can't put her and her family up, but for some reason Julia likes having her visit, although she spends the next bit insulting every room she's shown and snubbing Julia's taste in furnishings.
"Don’t you like my furniture? I love it. I hovered around it again and again; but I didn’t dream of having it in my room, it was so expensive. It’s real French enamel, you know, and happens to be a craze of fashion at present. I thought it was ridiculous to buy it, but Leslie insisted that it was the only thing for my room; and those crazy, extravagant children went and bought it when I had my head turned.”
Well, that was an effective way of bragging about the kids' money, their devotion to you, your sense, and the niceness of your furnishings all at once. Ellen makes her first neutral comment and decides to varnish her own furniture. All this shows some insight onto why Julia is manipulative and conflict-averse. Later there are prying questions about everyone's business, and the whole visit is wrapped up before the chapter is out. There is a little more filler as the Clouds spend their summer vacation. It doesn't last long either.
“We really ought to get back and see how the Christian Endeavor Society is getting along,” said Allison one day
I suspect Allison's firstborn will have a new terrible hero name: Christian Endeavor Cloud.
And so they went home to begin another happy winter. But the very first day there came a rift in their happiness in the shape of the new professor of chemistry,
Is he... AN ATHEIST?
a man about Julia Cloud’s age, whom Ellen Robinson had met on her visit to Thayerville, and told about her sister. Ellen had suggested that maybe he could get her sister to take him to board!
Just kidding. Of course not, atheists are drunken reprobates and/or shameless hussies, and Julia would convulse in their presence as if electrocuted. They will not pollute this book.
To this day Julia Cloud has never decided whether Ellen really thought Julia would take a professor from the college to board, or whether she just sent him there as a joke. There was a third solution, which Julia Cloud kept in the back of her mind and only took out occasionally with an angry, troubled look when she was very much annoyed. It was that Ellen was still anxious to have her sister get married, and she had taken this way to get her acquainted with a man whom she thought a “good match”. If Julia had been sure that this idea had entered into her sister’s thoughts, she might have slammed the door in Professor Armitage’s face that night when he had the audacity to come and ask to be taken into Cloudy Villa as a boarder.
I don't know there's any question; nothing pleases Ellen more than to try to run Julia's business, so she was practicing to keep her hand in. But slamming the door in a man's face because someone sent him across the country on a wild-goose chase to see if marriage crossed his mind? Why? He's just a pawn here.
So the man visits time and again until he's accepted as a household presence, until Leslie and Allison realize he might be courting Julia and secretly discuss it. This leads to that scene in Jane Austen where the household all wanders off on various pretexts to leave the two lovebirds to sew things up.
It was after supper that very night that Leslie, having almost frightened Julia Cloud out of her happy calm by refusing to eat much supper, went off to bed with a headache as soon as the professor came in. Allison, too, said he had to go up to the college for a book he had forgotten; and for the first time since his advent the professor had a clear evening ahead of him with Julia Cloud, without anybody else by.
And it immediately backfires, since Julia just stands around worrying about Leslie and then threatens to send for a doctor. Leslie has to lie and tell her she's just stressed about studies.
Julia Cloud, only half reassured by this unprecedented carefulness for her health on the part of the usually careless Leslie, went down abstractedly to her professor, and wished he would go home. He was well into the midst of a most heartfelt and touching proposal of marriage before she realized what was coming.
Okay, another point to Grace. We are wandering off point a lot to follow her plot twists, but I don't care, she's got a buttered-popcorn touch when she gets rolling.
It happened that Miss Myrtle Villers had not confined her affections to Mr. Bartram Laws. She had been seen wandering about the campus with other youths at odd hours of the evening when young-lady students were supposed to be safely within college halls or properly chaperoned at some public gathering.
Every so often GLH pops off with some detail from another world, this being one. The sexist double standard built in here makes a little sense during the days of no access to abortion or birth control, but it sounds a bit like the college thinks perhaps they should have their heads covered too and not be allowed anywhere without a husband or male relative. And maybe a prohibition on driving.
The “student exec” had had her in tow for several weeks, and she had already received a number of reproofs and warnings. A daring escapade the evening before had brought matters to a head,
We will never find out what it was, although perhaps when she is going about alone with strange boys past curfew, perhaps that is all GLH dared suggest.
However that was, when the executive body in consultation with the dean sent for her, they traced her to the Clouds’ house. At least, they came there about seven o’clock to inquire and hoping to take her unaware. They had found Allison in a great state of excitement, telephoning hither and yon to try to get some clew to his sister’s whereabouts. They had remained to advise and suggest, greatly worried at the whole situation, the more so because it involved Leslie Cloud, whose bright presence had taken great hold upon everybody.
So that is why the dean was there.
And now, without knowing it, Leslie Cloud had taken the one way to put the whole matter into the right hands and to exonerate herself. If she had known that any member of the faculty was in that room listening, if she had dreamed that even her brother was there, she would not have thought it right or honorable to put even an enemy in such a position, either for her own sake or for the girl’s.
Also kidnapping and interrogating her at gunpoint might have gone past the bounds.
She had only wanted some wise, true adviser to know the truth, so that the girl might learn what was right and have the responsibility taken from her own shoulders. She thought, too, that she had a right to be exonerated before her aunt. So now, while she wept out her contrition in Julia Cloud’s arms, retribution was coming swiftly to Myrtle Villers; and her career in that college was sealed with finality. It was only too plain that such a girl was a menace
such a girl was a menace
SUCH A GIRL WAS A MENACE
Thanks for noticing, mister dean.
Presently Leslie, feeling something strange in the atmosphere, lifted frightened, tear-filled eyes, and saw the grave faces of the dean and his companions! She held her breath with suspense. How terrible! How public and unseemly! She had brought all this upon herself and her family by her persistent friendship with this silly girl! And she fell to trembling and shuddering, all her fine, sweet nerve gone now that the strain was over.
The gun is still over there on the table, so if the dean strains her anymore he may become a colander.
Presently the dean and his committee were gone, taking the cowering Myrtle with them, and Leslie lay snuggled up on the couch, with Allison building up the fire and Cherry bringing a tray with a nice supper.
Thus passes Myrtle from the book, which makes a lot of sense since she just got expelled. And HI CHERRY! I bet she cooked that, Cherry is awesome. The in-depth readings for Elsie Dinsmore were kind of scarring, since a black person in a period chick-lit piece is now an automatic cringe-inducer. We never see Cherry take the front stage again, but her little mentions are always positive.
It's not really progressive because she's a minor character who's a house-servant, but this is one novel where her presence is just as a person who happens to be there, working and getting paid. Plus I can imagine her in her pleasant room. Leaving her for now, Allison is telling Leslie:
"She was headed straight for a bad end, and no mistake. All the fellows knew it, and the faculty suspected it; and it was making no end of trouble. But now the girl may be saved, for that dean never lets a student go to destruction, they say, if he can help it. Oh, of course he’ll fire her. She isn’t fit to be around here. But he’ll keep an eye on her, and he’ll fire her in such a way that she’ll have another chance to make good if she’s willing to take it."
How he's going to influence and watch her and fire her and expel her and give her another chance all at once is never disclosed. Perhaps the dean is also some kind of angel, if a more masculine, paternal one.
“He smelled of liquor; and he had great, coarse lips and eyes; and he put his arms around her, and kissed her right there before us all; and they acted perfectly disgusting! I’m almost sure from things I heard them say that she hadn’t been engaged to him at all, she hadn’t even known him till last week. She met him in town--just picked him up on the street! And that Fred Hicks! I don’t believe now he was her cousin at all.”
Not the fizziest little soda on the counter, that Leslie.
Allison seemed quite satisfied with these sentiments, and they had a beautiful time eating their supper before the fire, for no one had had any appetite before; and Cherry was as pleased to have the anxiety over and wait upon them all as if Leslie had been her own sister.
HI CHERRY hold it, how is she as pleased to wait on Leslie as if Leslie had been her own sister? Does she ever tell her sister to refill her own damn glass?
Into the midst of their little family group broke a hurried, excited knock on the door, and there stood Howard Letchworth with anxious face.
“I heard that your sister and one of the college girls had gone off in a car and got lost. Is it true? I came right around to see if I could help.”
"Howard Letchworth" is just terrible. It is below Bromly Egerton on the Terrible Hero Name Choices scale, if above George Prescott Godhelpus Benedict. Either the other students think so too and have brushed him off, or those two student council kids have been persuaded not to tell the most interesting eyewitness story of their lives. Or perhaps there is a third option.
“I know who that Laws fellow is,” he said gravely. “He’s rotten! And I shouldn’t wonder if I could locate his friend. I get around quite a bit on my motor-cycle. May I use your ’phone a minute? I have a friend who is a detective. They ought to be rounded up. Miss Leslie, would you tell me carefully just what roads you took, as nearly as you know?”
Howard found Leslie's house after handling her necklace. He also showed up immediately after she was in trouble. This 'detective friend' thing is a cover, he is a psychic and he just needs a moment to secretly inform the cops of their location.
There was the same look in Howard Letchworth’s eyes when he looked at Leslie, the age-old beauty of a man’s clean devotion to a sweet, pure woman soul.
Howard Letchworth. Oh god. So they all hang out, talk about Christian Endeavor, and have a little music time. No dancing, just playing and singing hymns.
Howard Letchworth had been most thoughtful about the matter in the village, and had managed so that the tragic had been taken out of the story that had started to roll about, and Leslie could go around and not feel that all eyes were upon her wondering about her escapade.
Oh, the dean gets no credit for gagging those two students and propagating the story Howard first heard.
Life goes back to normal, since they probably stopped telling Leslie where the gun was stored. Julia Cloud's reality-warping field spreads further and further.
“It is our time when we catch up in our loving for all the week,” Leslie explained with a quaint smile to one girl who broadly hinted that she would not mind being asked for over Sunday. “And, besides, you mightn’t like the way we keep Sunday. Everybody who comes has to go to church and Christian Endeavor with us, and enjoy our Bible-reading, singing hour around the fire; and I didn’t think you would.”
“Well, I like your nerve!” answered the girl; but she sat studying Leslie afterwards with a thoughtful gaze, and began to wonder whether, after all, a Sunday spent in that way might not be really interesting.
I don't know what to make of "catch up in our loving." It won't be the sixties for about forty years, and it sounds like they procrastinate love the rest of the time.
Oh, how those college-fed boys and girls enjoyed these picnics, with Julia Cloud as a kind of hovering angel to minister with word or smile or in some more practical way, wherever there was need! They all called her “Cloudy Jewel” now whenever they dared, and envied those who got closest to her and told her their troubles. Many a lad or lassie brought her his or her perplexities; and often as they sat around the winter camp, perhaps on a rock brushed free from snow, she gave them sage advice wrapped up in pleasant stories that were brought in ever so incidentally.
THANK YOU. Finally Julia as angel is made explicit after chapter after chapter of miraculous, excessively improbable reforming of all she touches. And I like her stories. It's like Miss Marple with comparisons of whatever just happened in St. Mary Mead, only without the murder.
And sometimes, as they walked homeward through the twilight of a long, happy afternoon, and the streaks of crimson were beginning to glow in the gray of the horizon, some one or two would lag behind and ask her deep, sweet questions about life and its meaning and its hereafter.
Then she met a philosophy student and they froze to death.
Often they showed her their hearts as they had never shown them even to their own people, and often a word with her sent some student back to work harder and fight stronger against some subtle temptation.
I'm waiting for the part where the students unanimously ban dancing on campus.
She became a wholesome antidote to the spirit of doubt and atheism that had crept stealthily into the college and was attacking so many and undermining what little faith in religion they had when they came there.
Oh, please. She has palpitations and agonies whenever the junior Clouds think bad thoughts. If anyone expressed atheism in her presence she'd die on the spot.
At the close of such an evening it was not an uncommon happening for a crowd of the frat boys to gather in a knot in front of the house and give the college yell, with a tiger at the end, and then “CLOUD! CLOUD! CLOUD!” The people living on that street got used to it, and opened their windows to listen, with eyes tender and thoughtful as they pondered on how easily this little family had caught the hearts of those college people, and were helping them to have a good time.
Then they would scream "SHUT THE HELL UP!" and bang their windows down. Honestly, some of her actual romances aren't such improbable wish fulfillment.
There is more about the Christian Endeavor and how it is bringing the humble village kids and the college kids together, but I'm getting cavities and I'm going to hunt for more interesting bits. What was the run-down on interest? Conflicts resolved, no kidnapings on the horizon, the nosy neighbor and Ellen left back at home-
“For mercy’s sake, Julia, what a queer house you’ve got!” said Ellen the minute she arrived, gazing disapprovingly at the many windows and the brick terrace. “I should think ’twould take all your time to keep clean. What’s the idea in making a sidewalk of your front porch? Looks as if some crazy person had built it. Couldn’t you find anything better than this in the town? I saw some real pretty frame houses with gardens as we came through.”
Oh. That'll do.
“We like this very well,” said Julia Cloud with her old patient smile and the hurt flush that always accompanied her answers to her sister’s contempt. “Cherry doesn’t seem to mind washing windows. She likes to keep them bright."
Ellen offers to keep going if they can't put her and her family up, but for some reason Julia likes having her visit, although she spends the next bit insulting every room she's shown and snubbing Julia's taste in furnishings.
"Don’t you like my furniture? I love it. I hovered around it again and again; but I didn’t dream of having it in my room, it was so expensive. It’s real French enamel, you know, and happens to be a craze of fashion at present. I thought it was ridiculous to buy it, but Leslie insisted that it was the only thing for my room; and those crazy, extravagant children went and bought it when I had my head turned.”
Well, that was an effective way of bragging about the kids' money, their devotion to you, your sense, and the niceness of your furnishings all at once. Ellen makes her first neutral comment and decides to varnish her own furniture. All this shows some insight onto why Julia is manipulative and conflict-averse. Later there are prying questions about everyone's business, and the whole visit is wrapped up before the chapter is out. There is a little more filler as the Clouds spend their summer vacation. It doesn't last long either.
“We really ought to get back and see how the Christian Endeavor Society is getting along,” said Allison one day
I suspect Allison's firstborn will have a new terrible hero name: Christian Endeavor Cloud.
And so they went home to begin another happy winter. But the very first day there came a rift in their happiness in the shape of the new professor of chemistry,
Is he... AN ATHEIST?
a man about Julia Cloud’s age, whom Ellen Robinson had met on her visit to Thayerville, and told about her sister. Ellen had suggested that maybe he could get her sister to take him to board!
Just kidding. Of course not, atheists are drunken reprobates and/or shameless hussies, and Julia would convulse in their presence as if electrocuted. They will not pollute this book.
To this day Julia Cloud has never decided whether Ellen really thought Julia would take a professor from the college to board, or whether she just sent him there as a joke. There was a third solution, which Julia Cloud kept in the back of her mind and only took out occasionally with an angry, troubled look when she was very much annoyed. It was that Ellen was still anxious to have her sister get married, and she had taken this way to get her acquainted with a man whom she thought a “good match”. If Julia had been sure that this idea had entered into her sister’s thoughts, she might have slammed the door in Professor Armitage’s face that night when he had the audacity to come and ask to be taken into Cloudy Villa as a boarder.
I don't know there's any question; nothing pleases Ellen more than to try to run Julia's business, so she was practicing to keep her hand in. But slamming the door in a man's face because someone sent him across the country on a wild-goose chase to see if marriage crossed his mind? Why? He's just a pawn here.
So the man visits time and again until he's accepted as a household presence, until Leslie and Allison realize he might be courting Julia and secretly discuss it. This leads to that scene in Jane Austen where the household all wanders off on various pretexts to leave the two lovebirds to sew things up.
It was after supper that very night that Leslie, having almost frightened Julia Cloud out of her happy calm by refusing to eat much supper, went off to bed with a headache as soon as the professor came in. Allison, too, said he had to go up to the college for a book he had forgotten; and for the first time since his advent the professor had a clear evening ahead of him with Julia Cloud, without anybody else by.
And it immediately backfires, since Julia just stands around worrying about Leslie and then threatens to send for a doctor. Leslie has to lie and tell her she's just stressed about studies.
Julia Cloud, only half reassured by this unprecedented carefulness for her health on the part of the usually careless Leslie, went down abstractedly to her professor, and wished he would go home. He was well into the midst of a most heartfelt and touching proposal of marriage before she realized what was coming.
Okay, another point to Grace. We are wandering off point a lot to follow her plot twists, but I don't care, she's got a buttered-popcorn touch when she gets rolling.