Читать книгу The Blind Man's House. A Quiet Story онлайн

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He conducted as few of the church services as possible and left a great deal to his red-haired kindly curate, Mr. Townley. Strange it was that he had not even any hobbies. He liked a novel in front of the fire, a drive in the little family Austin, food, drink, and a pretty woman, although his morals were irreproachable. What spirit slumbered inside his slumbering form no one knew. He wore shabby old clothes, but his linen was always shining and his person as clean as a new penny. He was seldom seen without a pipe in his mouth, and he would look at you, his hands deep in his pockets, his brown eyes half closed and a little smile hovering about his handsome lips.

Now, oddly enough, his wife, Daisy Brennan, was also a beauty. Phyllis called her once 'a Juno in the cornfield,' and although this meant really nothing at all, everyone liked and repeated it. She was a tall, big, full-breasted woman with masses of corn-coloured hair which was piled, in old-fashioned style, on the top of her head and braided above her temples. She wore clothes in bright gay colours that fitted her closely so that her bosom, her thighs were handsomely, defined. She walked with her head up gloriously, and only Mrs. Irwin, the post-mistress, who hated her, made the rude comment: 'Pantomime Queen, that's what I call her. You know, one of them big girls in tights walks down a lot of steps at the end and calls herself Canada.'