Читать книгу First the Blade. A Comedy of Growth онлайн

45 страница из 83

She took a last look at the patch-work country, noted once again the lie of the road through the valley below, and then, with a little gasp like a bather taking the plunge, took to her heels and ran down the hill-side.

ssss1

How long a day can be! An hour or less—so much less than an hour—how it can lie in one’s memory like an interminable road, when pleasant years are more forgotten than towns passed in the train. How long a little time can be! Once I saw a woman—not Laura—grow old between a question and an answer—between the opening and the shutting of a door.

Laura, at ten or twelve, would usher in a reminiscence with “When I was a little girl,” and look bewildered if you laughed. “When I was young,” said Laura, as innocently, at seventeen. And each time Laura would be thinking of that Age of Gold and Crystal Palaces, with Mother at the beginning, and at the end of it—Justin. And yet, less of it than of the four-hour Odyssey that closes her childhood, that cuts her memories in two and provides you with the spectacle, comical, pathetic, or merely curious, as it happens to strike you, of a proved soul waiting wearily, amid school books and pig-tails and lengthening skirts, amid vanities and ignorances and experiments, for body and brain to grow up to it.