FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   139   140   141   142   143   144   145   146   147   148   149   150   151   152   153   154   155   156   157   158   159   160   161   162   163  
164   165   166   167   168   169   170   171   172   173   174   175   176   177   178   179   180   181   182   183   184   185   186   187   188   >>   >|  
hem. But Prince was a knowing little beast, and she grew fond of him. After breakfast I made him do his lessons; play dead dog, shake hands, stand up like a soldier. We used to put my cadet cap on his head--I had to take military drill at the university--and give him a yard-measure to hold with his front leg. His gravity made us laugh immoderately. Lena's talk always amused me. Antonia had never talked like the people about her. Even after she learned to speak English readily, there was always something impulsive and foreign in her speech. But Lena had picked up all the conventional expressions she heard at Mrs. Thomas's dressmaking shop. Those formal phrases, the very flower of small-town proprieties, and the flat commonplaces, nearly all hypocritical in their origin, became very funny, very engaging, when they were uttered in Lena's soft voice, with her caressing intonation and arch naivete. Nothing could be more diverting than to hear Lena, who was almost as candid as Nature, call a leg a 'limb' or a house a 'home.' We used to linger a long while over our coffee in that sunny corner. Lena was never so pretty as in the morning; she wakened fresh with the world every day, and her eyes had a deeper colour then, like the blue flowers that are never so blue as when they first open. I could sit idle all through a Sunday morning and look at her. Ole Benson's behaviour was now no mystery to me. 'There was never any harm in Ole,' she said once. 'People needn't have troubled themselves. He just liked to come over and sit on the drawside and forget about his bad luck. I liked to have him. Any company's welcome when you're off with cattle all the time.' 'But wasn't he always glum?' I asked. 'People said he never talked at all.' 'Sure he talked, in Norwegian. He'd been a sailor on an English boat and had seen lots of queer places. He had wonderful tattoos. We used to sit and look at them for hours; there wasn't much to look at out there. He was like a picture book. He had a ship and a strawberry girl on one arm, and on the other a girl standing before a little house, with a fence and gate and all, waiting for her sweetheart. Farther up his arm, her sailor had come back and was kissing her. "The Sailor's Return," he called it.' I admitted it was no wonder Ole liked to look at a pretty girl once in a while, with such a fright at home. 'You know,' Lena said confidentially, 'he married Mary because he thought she was s
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   139   140   141   142   143   144   145   146   147   148   149   150   151   152   153   154   155   156   157   158   159   160   161   162   163  
164   165   166   167   168   169   170   171   172   173   174   175   176   177   178   179   180   181   182   183   184   185   186   187   188   >>   >|  



Top keywords:
talked
 

People

 

sailor

 

English

 

morning

 
pretty
 
mystery
 

deeper

 
drawside
 

forget


colour

 

Sunday

 
flowers
 

troubled

 
behaviour
 

Benson

 
company
 
Farther
 

sweetheart

 

kissing


waiting

 

standing

 

Sailor

 

Return

 

married

 

confidentially

 

thought

 

admitted

 

called

 

fright


strawberry

 
Norwegian
 

cattle

 

picture

 

tattoos

 
places
 

wonderful

 
gravity
 

immoderately

 
measure

amused
 

Antonia

 
impulsive
 
foreign
 

speech

 

picked

 
readily
 

people

 
learned
 

university