Читать книгу Wintersmoon онлайн

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The vast white space of Hyde Park Corner encircled them like a crystal lake. St. George's Hospital was black and forbidding like a jutting crag. The cab stopped to allow the motor-cars to pass, and with glaring fiery eyes like wolves out on the hunt they slipped by. Rosalind looked at her sister Janet, and saw that she was sitting back in her corner of the cab, her eyes closed. Something had happened to Janet! Rosalind knew it at once. The sisters always knew about one another. But something had also happened to Rosalind. Young Tom Seddon had as good as proposed to her. Only a few words, but they had been enough to tell her. And she didn't want him to propose. He mustn't propose, because if he did she would only refuse him and then all the pleasant friendly companionship of the last few years would be changed. She would refuse him because for one thing she didn't love him, and because for another and a more important thing he hadn't any money. His mother had just enough to keep herself and her son in that decent genteel poverty that Rosalind so thoroughly loathed. It was true that Tom was clever and might one day be an Ambassador, but all that was far distant. Moreover, there was something else about Tom. He was old-fashioned; he didn't believe in Socialism nor Freudian theories of abnormality nor modern painting, novels, and poetry. That is, when one said that he didn't believe in these things one meant that he considered them all and found them wanting, or, if not wanting, at least not perfection.