Читать книгу First the Blade. A Comedy of Growth онлайн

24 страница из 83

Above all there were the five little Mouldes, models of deportment, with neat pinafores, and straight fair hair, and white eyelashes, and noses moistly pink, like puppies. Laura was expected to invite or to go to tea with them at least once a week, though it soon appeared that the visits needed Aunt Adela’s eye to be even superficially successful. Only Aunt Adela’s eye could prevent Laura from retiring under the nearest bed with a book, and refusing to budge till it was time for herself or her visitors to depart. It enraged Laura that the accident of age should mark her down for friendship with Annabel Moulde, a sly, skinny child to whom Aunt Adela invariably referred as “A little mother. So good to all her brothers and sisters.” As if Laura didn’t try to be good to Wilfred and James—when Aunt Adela wasn’t looking!... Because it was for Mother ... because she had promised ... not to please Aunt Adela ... not to show off like Annabel.... Laura despised Annabel for her ostentatious virtue and her meagre bookshelf—Queechy, Ministering Children, Melbourne House, Jessica’s First Prayer.... She was expected to be friends with a little girl who enjoyed—yes, enjoyed—reading Jessica’s First Prayer! Yet Annabel, unconsciously, had done her a good turn; for Laura, bursting with the humorous horror of that discovery, had been impelled to break her habit of silence to impart the joke, tentatively, to Gran’papa Valentine—and Gran’papa, over his spectacles and his Boswell, had been surprised into a chuckle, and a stirring of interest in a granddaughter to whose credit he had heard little, and, conversation developing, had ended, to their mutual amazement, in bestowing upon her the freedom of his sitting-room and his biscuit tin, and certain of his unlocked bookshelves. After which there was, at least, always Gran’papa!