Explore "Penelope, Volume III" by William Pitt Scargill on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
All as yet had been silence at Neverden rectory. Mr Darnley the elder, and Mrs Darnley and the young ladies, all knew as well as could be that Robert had renewed his acquaintance with Miss Primrose; but the father was wilfully and perversely silent on the subject, and the rest of the family felt themselves in duty bound to be silent also.
There is something curious and awkward in a kind of family -- not quarrel, but coldness, when the family is not habituated to anything of that nature. Some families always have a species of domestic sparring, or are periodically visited with a fit of family sulks, and then it passes off very glibly and quietly, and makes no more alteration in, or impression upon, the ordinary family features, than does the light cloud that passes over the moon.