



Produced by Fulvia Hughes, Suzanne Shell and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)







Transcriber's Note:
  Bold text is denoted by =equal signs=.
  The upside-down asterisms are denoted by *.*
  The list of the corrected items is at the end of this e-book.




=Edgar Fawcett's Novels.=

_Mr. Fawcett is a novelist who does a service that greatly needs to be
done,--a novelist who writes of the life with which he is closely
acquainted, and who manfully emphasizes his respect for his native land,
and his contempt for the weakness and affectation of those who are
ashamed of their country._--New York Evening Post.


_A GENTLEMAN OF LEISURE._

_Ninth Edition._ "Little Classic" style. 18mo, $1.00.

Take it as a whole, we know no English novel of the last few years fit
to be compared with it in its own line for simplicity, truth, and
rational interest.--_London Times._

It is the most truly American novel that has been given to the world in
some time, for the reason that it teaches Americans--or, at all events,
should teach them--what puny and puerile beings they become when they
attempt to decry their own country and ape the idiosyncrasies of
another.--_New York Express._

An amazingly clever book, the story well managed in the telling, the
dialogue bright and sparkling, and the humor unforced and
genuine.--_Boston Transcript._

It is a most charming story of American life and character, with a rare
dash of humor in it, and a good deal of vigorous satire.--_Quebec
Chronicle._


_A HOPELESS CASE._

_Fourth Edition._ "Little Classic" style. 18mo, $1.25.

"A Hopeless Case" contains much that goes to make up a novel of the best
order--wit, sarcasm, pathos, and dramatic power--with its sentences
clearly wrought out and daintily finished. It is a book which ought to
have a great success.--_Cincinnati Commercial._

"A Hopeless Case" will, we are sure, meet with a very enthusiastic
reception from all who can appreciate fiction of a high order. The
picture of New York society, as revealed in its pages, is remarkably
graphic and true to life.... A thoroughly delightful novel--keen, witty,
and eminently American. It will give the author a high rank as a writer
of fiction.--_Boston Traveller._

As a sprightly and interesting comedy this book will find hosts of
interested readers. It has its lessons of value in the striking
contrasts it furnishes of the different styles of life found in our
great cities.--_New England Journal of Education._

Its brilliant and faithful pictures of New York society and its charming
heroine can hardly fail to make it very popular.--_Salem Gazette._


_AN AMBITIOUS WOMAN._

12mo, cloth, $1.50.

*.* _For sale by Booksellers. Sent, by mail, post-paid, on receipt of
price by the Publishers_,

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO., BOSTON, MASS.




    AN AMBITIOUS WOMAN

    _A Novel_

    BY

    EDGAR FAWCETT

    AUTHOR OF "A GENTLEMAN OF LEISURE," "A HOPELESS
    CASE," ETC.

    [Illustration]

    BOSTON
    HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
    New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street
    =The Riverside Press, Cambridge=
    1884




    Copyright, 1888,
    BY EDGAR FAWCETT.

    _All rights reserved._




    _The Riverside Press, Cambridge:_
    Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.




AN AMBITIOUS WOMAN.

I.


If any spot on the globe can be found where even Spring has lost the
sweet trick of making herself charming, a cynic in search of an
opportunity for some such morose discovery might thank his baleful stars
were chance to drift him upon Greenpoint. Whoever named the place in
past days must have done so with a double satire; for Greenpoint is not
a point, nor is it ever green. Years ago it began by being the sluggish
suburb of a thriftier and smarter suburb, Brooklyn. By degrees the
latter broadened into a huge city, and soon its neighbor village
stretched out to it arms of straggling huts and swampy river-line, in
doleful welcome. To-day the affiliation is complete. Man has said let it
all be Brooklyn, and it is all Brooklyn. But the sovereign dreariness of
Greenpoint, like an unpropitiated god, still remains. Its melancholy,
its ugliness, its torpor, its neglect, all preserve an unimpaired
novelty. It is very near New York, and yet in atmosphere, suggestion,
vitality, it is leagues away. Our noble city, with its magnificent
maritime approaches, its mast-thronged docks, its lordly encircling
rivers, its majesty of traffic, its gallant avenues of edifices, its
loud assertion of life, and its fine promise of riper culture, fades
into a dim memory when you have touched, after only a brief voyage, upon
this forlorn opposite shore.

No Charon rows you across, though your short trip has too often the most
funereal associations. You take passage in a squat little steamboat at
either of two eastern ferries, and are lucky if a hearse with its
satellite coaches should fail to embark in your company; for, curiously,
the one enlivening fact associable with Greenpoint is its close nearness
to a famed Roman Catholic cemetery. It is doubtful if the unkempt child
wading in the muddy gutter ever turns his frowzy head when these dismal
retinues stream past him. They are always streaming past him; they are
as much a part of this lazy environ as the big, ghostly geese that
saunter across its ill-tended cobblestones, the dirty goats that nibble
at the placards on its many dingy fences, or the dull-faced Germans that
plod its semi-paven streets. Death, that is always so bitter a
commonplace, has here become a glaring triteness. Watched, along the
main thoroughfare, from porches of liquor-shops and windows of
tenement-houses, death has perhaps gained a sombre popularity with not a
few shabby gazers. It rides in state, at a dignified pace; it has
followers, too, riding deferentially behind it. Sometimes it has martial
music, and the pomp of military escort. Life seldom has any of this, in
Greenpoint. It cannot ride, or rarely. It must walk, and strain to keep
its strength even for that. One part of it drudges with the needle,
fumes over the smoky stove, sighs at the unappeasable baby; another part
takes by dawn the little dwarfish ferry-boat, and hies to the great
metropolis across the river, returning jaded from labor by nightfall.
No wonder, here, if death should seem to possess not merely a mournful
importance but a gloomy advantage as well, or if for these toilful
townsfolk philosophy had reversed itself, and instead of the paths of
glory leading to the grave, it should look as if the grave were forever
leading to some sort of peculiar and comfortable glory.

But Greenpoint, like a hardened conscience, still has her repentant
surprises. She is not quite a thing of sloth and penury. True, the broad
street that leads from steamboat to cemetery is lined with squalid
homes, and the mourners who are so incessantly borne along to Calvary
must see little else than beer-sellers standing slippered and coatless
beside their doorways, or thin, pinched women haggling with the venders
of sickly groceries. But elsewhere one may find by-streets lined with
low wooden dwellings that hint of neatness and suggest a better grade of
living. A yellowish drab prevails as the hue of these houses; they seem
all to partake of one period, like certain homogeneous fossils. But they
do not breathe of antiquity; they are fanciful with trellised piazzas
and other modern embellishments of carpentry; sometimes they possess
miniature Corinthian pillars, faded by the trickle of rain between their
tawny flutings, as if stirred with the dumb desire to be white and
classic. Scant gardens front them, edged with a few yards of ornamental
fence. Their high basement windows stare at you from a foundation of
brick. They are very prosaic, chiefly from their lame effort to be
picturesque; and when you look down toward the river, expecting to feel
refreshed by its gleam, you are disheartened at the way in which
lumber-yards and sloop-wharves have quite shut any glimpse of it from
your eyes.

In one of these two-storied wooden houses, not many years ago, dwelt a
family of three people,--a Mr. Francis Twining, his wife, and their only
child, a girl, named Claire. Mr. Twining was an Englishman by birth;
many years had passed since he first landed on these shores. He had come
here nearly penniless, but with proud hopes. He was then only
three-and-twenty. He had sprung from a good country family, had been
fitted at Eton for Oxford, and had seen one year at the famed
University. Then sharp financial disaster had overtaken his father,
whose death soon followed. Francis was a younger son, but even to