Читать книгу First the Blade. A Comedy of Growth онлайн

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She turned resolutely from temptation and hurried on.

But she was no longer dancing effortlessly along like a kitten or a whirled leaf: her haste had become deliberate and would soon be painful. She was growing—infallible sign of exhaustion—conscious of her body: conscious that her back was aching; that she was thirsty as well as hungry; that, through her sand shoes, the surface of the road knubbed her wincing feet. She carried her bunch of flowers, drooping, too, by this time, across her shoulder to ease her tired arm, but they were very heavy. Such a great big bunch—but then Laura, her life long, will always undertake a little more than she can manage.

Above her the unconquered hill-road stretched as steep and long and high as Jack’s Beanstalk. She climbed it wearily, bargaining herself upward—

“I will go to the second bend, up to the white birch. If I do it in a hundred steps I will stop a minute. If I do it in ninety steps I will stop two minutes.”

But it was always more than a hundred steps for sand shoes, and so, honourably, though her breathless little body were rocking, she would not stop.