Читать книгу Look Homeward, Angel. A Story of the Buried Life онлайн

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"You're a good-looking boy. I bet all the girls are wild about you."

He would blush in a maidenly way and she, bitten with curiosity, would press him:

"Come on, now. Who's your girl?"

"I haven't got one, honest, Miss Edith."

"You don't want one of these silly little girls, Eugene," she would say, coaxingly. "You're too good for them—you're a great deal older than your years. You need the understanding a mature woman can give you."

And they would walk away in the setting sun, skirting the pine-fresh woods, passing along the path red with maple leaves, past great ripening pumpkins in the fields, and under the golden autumnal odour of persimmons.

She would live alone with her mother, an old deaf woman, in a little cottage set back from the road against a shelter of lonely singing pines, with a few grand oaks and maples in the leaf-bedded yard.

Before they came to the house, crossing a field, it would be necessary to go over a stile; he would go over first, helping her down, looking ardently at the graceful curve of her long, deliberately exposed, silk-clad leg.