Читать книгу Barren Ground онлайн

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As she took the basket from her daughter, Mrs. Oakley's features softened slightly, but she did not smile. Only very young things, babies, puppies, chickens just out of the shell, made her smile, and then her smile was more plaintive than cheerful.

"Rufus can have his buckwheat cakes for breakfast," she said, without stopping in her movements from the table to the safe and from the safe to the stove.

She had worked so hard for so many years that the habit had degenerated into a disease, and thrift had become a tyrant instead of a slave in her life. From dawn until after dark she toiled, and then lay sleepless for hours because of the jerking of her nerves. She was, as she said of herself, "driven," and it was the tragedy of her lot that all her toil made so little impression. Though she spent every bit of her strength there was nothing to show for her struggle. Like the land, which took everything and gave back nothing, the farm had drained her vitality without altering its general aspect of decay.