Читать книгу Miss Bunting онлайн

67 страница из 93

At this point Mr. Pilbeam who, much as he enjoyed his new patient's spiral conversation, had his own living to earn, managed by a species of stage management perfected by him over a number of years, to waft her out of the room and into the arms of his secretary and so into the street. Her latest book was duly sent to him and since then she had revisited him once or twice, always on the same very friendly footing.

Now writing is a rum trade and eyes are rum things, and what is all right one day is all wrong the next. Mrs. Morland's sight was affected as most people's is by health, weather, heat, cold, lighting, added years, and by the sapping strain of some six years' totalitarian war. She was impatient with her eyes as most people are who have always had very good sight and nearly went mad with rage while accustoming herself to the bifocal glasses Mr. Pilbeam had ordered on her second visit. Finally she had collected four pairs of spectacles of varying power, from a rather dashing little semicircular lens for reading only, through the hated bifocals to which use had more or less reconciled her and an owl-like plain pair for cards (which she never played) and music (which she had almost entirely dropped), to a much stronger pair now really necessary for close work. To these she had added what she quite correctly called her face-à-main, feeling a pleasant inward disdain for her friends who said lorgnon or lorgnette. And what with mislaying all four pairs in every possible permutation and combination and catching the ribbon of her face-à-main in her clothes and the furniture, or bending it double by stooping suddenly, she hardly ever had the pair she needed. But the gods are just and of our pleasant vices do occasionally make something quite amusing, and we must say that Mrs. Morland got an infinite amount of innocent pleasure out of her armoury of glasses, and as she never expected people to listen to her she maundered on about them with considerable satisfaction to herself.