Word: branded
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Here is her trouble when Brand and Emma reach her in response to her summons: Elliott is days late in returning. Something has surely happened, probably to the boy. Wracked already, she is bitter with hate for Elliott when he does appear, dry-mouthed, caked with dust, to say he has lost Jackie in the trackless, beast-run hunting veld, lost him completely. There is a nightmare of searching. Mary's baby is born, prematurely but alive, in a desert railway shed. The boy is not found. Back on the farm, Mary's hatred for Elliott shades into insane belief...
...Story. Down on the lobe of the great elephant's ear that is Africa lives Mary Adams Glenn, in a farmhouse on the lonely veld below blue mountains. The farm belongs to Brand van Aardt, the slow, dependable lover of her girlhood. She lives there virtually on his charity with the amiable mediocrity whom she married instead of Brand. They have a ten-year-old boy, Jackie, and she is soon to bear again...
...first day of this book she sends her Kaffir runner with an imperative note to fetch Brand. He takes his wife, and on the longmotor drive out from Lebanon village there is time to recall years that have passed, to puzzle over Mary's trouble, whatever...
...desperately middle class. Mary was a pretty girl stricken with panic by society's failure to come running to her feet more often than it did. Her nature preened itself and craned for admiration, thus repelling it and thrusting the girl into bitter, pitiful snobbery. She grew to despise Brand, or any one, who thought well of her. Yet so determined was she to excite notice and envy that when she met a mild-mannered young English secretary in Cape Town, she invented for him a grand character, paraded him in Lebanon, married him and went to England. She sprinkled...
...Brand van Aardt had fallen back on the plain little school mistress, Emma, telling her honestly she was second choice. She had accepted honestly, wanting him even that way. They had grown together, honest friends, not exalted but not unhappy. He had amassed wealth. When Mary Glenn came home with her ineffectual husband and her fraying tissue of appearances, Brand had unobtrusively put them on the farm. It was a livelihood for Elliott Glenn, who was supinely grateful. For Mary it was a refuge, but also a torment. Her snobbery remained swollen while her pretences shriveled and her beauty went...