Читать книгу First the Blade. A Comedy of Growth онлайн

32 страница из 83

It was Christian’s fault: he simply wouldn’t be hurried. Stumbling along beside him over the difficult words, she was out of patience twenty times a day with his credulous, open-mouthed simplicity. He was no better than Wilfred and James who always believed every word that the coachman told them, or the gardener’s boy, or the chattering, black-eyed Frenchmen who came to the yard on Saturdays to sell onions. She had no patience with them or with conversational Christian, wasting his time and losing his way. Did he think that she, Laura, would have been taken in like that, over and over again, by Vain Confidence and Flatterer and Mr. Worldly Wiseman? Why, the very names were enough to put even the twins on their guard, and Christian was grown-up! Byways Meadow—there she acknowledged that she too might have strayed: she hankered after little cross-country paths herself, though Nurse and Aunt Adela always insisted on the dull, dusty, put-on-your-gloves high-road; but she would never have pounded off to Sinai, or stood by the hour arguing and disputing and contradicting about unintelligible things like Carnal Cogitations and The Carcase of Religion, long before she had got to heaven and found Mother.