Mills and Boon Old Fashioned Girl
(view spoiler)[The old-fashioned girl of the title is Patience Martin, ane of Betty's not-obviously-pretty heroines with beautiful gray eyes, abundant mousy hair, and a applied but optimistic personality. Patience lives with her elderly aunts, caring for them at the expense of a career and life of her own. Just she does it willingly and with beloved and shields them from the harsher realities of their loss of capital (in a bad investment) and home. To make ends come across, they take been forced to rent out the comfortable former-fashioned rural Norfolk business firm they've always lived in and move into a pocket-size place in the hamlet. Fortunately, our hero, eminent Rich Dutch Doctor, Julius van der Beek, decides to hire the house for vi months while he works on a medical reference book. At the solicitor'southward suggestion, he hires Patience as a "general factotum"—someone who will answer phones, deal with tradesmen, assist out as needed, and by and large shield him from all distractions and interruptions while he works on his book. His bleak housekeeper, Miss Murch, is on hand to make certain she works hard and doesn't disturb the doctor. But the physician is nonetheless disturbed (and annoyed about it) past her: a mouselike creature…Her eyes were cute though; he reflected for a moment on the length and curl of her eyelashes. She had a mannerly phonation likewise…. Patience is equally intrigued by the handsome, if aloof, md but does her best to continue out of his way. But a snowstorm cuts the firm off from the village for a few days, and although Miss Murch is on paw equally chaperone, the storm creates a sort of intimacy between them as they split chores to keep the house warm and everyone fed with dwindling food supplies. Following the storm, Julius asks Patience if she'll type his manuscript (for one time a BN heroine has office skills!) for more than pay, which she agrees to do. Patience decides some of information technology can be spared for new clothes; "she had seen the looks Mr. van der Beek had bandage at her from fourth dimension to time—indifference mingled with pity—and she had institute them hard to bear." Our heroine is already falling for Julius but hasn't quite admitted information technology yet—but her efforts to improve her looks are surprisingly angsty, especially when her changed advent garners goose egg more than than a "brief and wholly uninterested" glance. …Patience had a hard job convincing herself that it didn't thing in the to the lowest degree that he hadn't fifty-fifty noticed her outfit. She told herself stoutly that she had bought the clothes to please herself and with other thought in listen. A palpable prevarication she had no intention of admitting to. Just he has noticed: "I like the new clothes, Patience…Did y'all call back I hadn't noticed?" He is thinking of her also, in telling ways even if he's still wondering at his interest in her: He had been thinking nigh her a good bargain and laughing at himself for doing and so. He told himself that at that place was zilch about her to attract his thoughts; a small dab of a girl, although he had to admit that she had beautiful optics, articulate and trusting… she had been total of surprises; no one, seeing her for the commencement time, would credit her with the sound common sense she undoubtedly possessed… The people in the village liked her… and she had courage. . . . She deserved ameliorate things from life. "Don't, I beg you, repeat everything I say like a poll parrot; only sit still and listen." "I'm listening and I'm sitting still," said Patience snappily, "and stop talking as though you were addressing a coming together." His eyebrows rose at that, and then he laughed. No i had talked to him similar that for a long time, and he rather enjoyed it.
"Well, aye, but information technology wouldn't have mattered—I meant I bought them because I wanted to look prissy and they were pretty." You tell him, Patience! But when he goes away for a few days, she misses him: It was more than than a week earlier he returned, and long before and so she had to acknowledge to herself that she missed him—him and his cold eyes, his banal remoteness and his sudden kindnesses and his indifference. I just beloved Betty's understated angst. No loftier drama, just placidity, seemingly unrequited love hidden by a stoic heroine who would hate if he were to guess her feelings and pity her.
He enjoys her surprising tartness on occasion besides (normally when he's being overbearing in that RDD mode):
His book completed, Julius leaps at the chance to proceed Patience effectually longer, every bit temporary nanny for his niece while her ain nanny recovers from appendicitis. So we're off to London, with a trip to Holland (of course!) following. Our kind-at-heart hero makes arrangements for the heroine's elderly aunts to stay in their old habitation with his housekeeper to treat them.
Patience goes to Julius's lovely house in a posh part of London—no modern service flats for our RDDs! Toddler Rosie is a charmer, every bit is Julius'due south sister Marijke, who is pregnant and not feeling well and anxious that Patience not think her selfish and lazy (unlike another BN hero sisters who unrepentantly selfish and lazy--the hero's sis in Magic in Venice, who leaves her preteen girl with her female parent when she jaunts off to South American for two years with her married man and who fires the heroine with no notice and pretends she'due south doing her a favor, springs to heed—pfffttt, our poor heroines sometimes go from crappy relatives to crappy in-laws, although they don't seem to realize it).
Julius tries to be aloof and indifferent to Patience while she's in London, only she's ever on his heed, outshining even the pretty, well-dressed young ladies who vie for his attention. Patience, on the other hand, is conspicuously trying to avoid him, and Julius, used, without conceit, to the eagerness of the opposite sex to behave him visitor, felt intrigued…[it was] an altogether unlike matter from his avoidance of her.…
Despite trying hard to finish mooning over him, Patience has her Dawning Realization soon after [after a long night at the hospital] he was tired, and Patience, looking at the weary lines in his face, had the sudden feeling that all that mattered was to erase those same lines, tell him to go to bed while she got him a warm potable and see to it that he had a proficient night's sleep. If he had a wife, she thought, she would do that for him…and she was almost swept away with the strong desire to be that wife. She stood looking at him…struck dumb past her discovery... She objects strongly when she realizes he's going back to work and is mortified when he looks at her with "astonished amusement," but we get our first kiss before he leaves.
Nanny's still under the weather, so he suggests to his sister that Patience get back to The netherlands with her temporarily. "I'll accept her out this evening and explicate things to her," he says. Patience is at starting time delighted by his invitation, merely becomes annoyed when he is typically high handed almost it: this wasn't an invitation, it was a forgone determination, at least on his part. For ii pins she wouldn't get, knowing even as she idea it that of course she would go. He wasn't in the to the lowest degree bit interested in her simply at to the lowest degree she would be in his company for an 60 minutes or two and it would be an occasion to treasure later on. How does this not infuriate me? I guess a couple of reasons—Betty'southward heroines are so articulate-eyed well-nigh their prospects and motives, normally, and so determined to keep their feelings a secret fifty-fifty as they determine to live in the moment and see what happens, that she avoids making them sad somehow. And then she pulls information technology off, for me at least.
Notwithstanding, Patience is a little biting inside about what a convenience she is for him, "first his house and his volume and now his niece," and despite enjoying the meal and chat, and the discovery they share a lot of tastes and opinions, she begins to wonder if he was making an endeavor to be agreeable so that he could be sure she would hold to go… She tells him that he didn't need to bring her out—she didn't need buttering up, and he is clearly aroused at the assumption, but when she apologizes and hopes she didn't ruin the evening, he relaxes and smiles at her; perhaps she had imagined the ferocity.
We're off to The netherlands, a familiar trip for Betty readers! No big travelogue—Patience'south nanny routine seems much the same every bit it was in Chiswick. Julius does have her and Rosie to his house for the day—and insists that Patience call him Julius at present that he'southward no longer employing her. Progress! He has the typical RDD beautiful ancestral habitation, complete with a second Faithful Family unit Retainer named Dobbs (brother to Julius's London Dobbs, hee!). Nosotros also go an understated Dawning Realization from our hero: He tucked his niece under his arm and held out the other hand to Patience. It was a large, firm hand, and the feel of it on hers made her insides tremble. He didn't let information technology become at once either, just all the same held information technology closely, looking downwards at her so searchingly that she asked, "Is in that location anything the matter, is something wrong?"
"On the contrary, everything is very right."
Patience gets the Habitation Tour of Eternal Honey and is lamentable at the idea that he will live there with someone else, "some very cute girl…who would be the confident hostess of this lovely old home." Merely she typically decides that there was all solar day ahead of her and in Julius's company. Never mind the hereafter—that could take care of itself for the moment—she was going to savor every moment of at present.
Only alas, their idyll is interrupted by the arrival of Sylvia van Teule—striking, dressed to impale, and on the make for our RDD. Julius wants no part of her, though: "His optics were like blue ice" when she demands to know what Patience is doing at his home. Sylvia is very much the outsider in their happy fiddling pseudo-family circle(and Rosie does her flake by sticking her tongue out at snotty Sylvia, hee).
Just Patience is even more adamant to go over Julius, and he decides afterward "it would exist the wrong moment to advise…some tentative ideas about her future." He is returning to England, and we get our second kiss before he goes: No one had ever kissed her like that earlier…rather similar an electric shock, she idea bemusedly… she just stood in that location, gazing up into his face up….
Patience runs into Sylvia while shopping in Den Haag, and the other daughter claims that she and Julius are a couple. Our silly heroine believes her—a typical Betty device that works only because her heroines usually have self-confidence issues (even the pretty ones are remarkable self-effacing and a little shy).
Patience returns to England. To her great surprise, Julius is waiting to drive her home. He tells her they'll talk, just before any such conversation takes place, Patience reveals her belief that he and Sylvia are a couple, and Julius tells her that he doesn't have time to untangle the muddle she'due south in, but he'll be dorsum.
And when he does come back, we go a quick resolution every bit he makes it articulate that it'southward Patience he wants—indeed intends—to marry. "I find that life is intolerable without you, my beloved love; yous are in my mind and my heart and beneath my eyelids when I sleep. I think that I accept always loved you….You are beautiful and clever and my heart's desire." Awwww. A nicely romantic annunciation and HEA that wraps things up neatly! (hide spoiler)]
Betty car porn:
Hero drives the standard-upshot Bentley (second merely to Rolls Royce in her RDD car choices): 
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