"Lofts, Norah - How Far To Bethlehem" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lofts Norah)

Four young women walked together; two and two because the path was
narrow. They did not quite conform to pattern because one of them was
married, the mother of one child and pregnant again. Rachel walked
with her friends for several reasons. One was practical. They could
be trusted to carry Joshua, turn and turn about. He was a fat,
handsome, lazy little boy, nineteen months old, and he could walk but
preferred to be carried. Married women had no patience with her; they
said she spoiled him: they said, set him down and walk away, he'll
follow quick enough: they issued really horrid warnings about what
would happen to the unborn child if she insisted upon lifting and

carrying that great lump of idleness. Not one of them seemed to
realise that if she spoiled Joshua it was because he was the only joy
her marriage had brought her. There was her other reason for wishing
to walk with the girls. She'd had no wish to be married; she disliked
the man her parents had chosen for her. Despite Joshua and the bulge
below her girdle, she still felt unmarried, wished that she were,
sometimes dreamed that she was, and on the daily exodus to the spring
liked to pretend that she was.

On this morning they were talking--as girls tend to do in Spring--about
clothes. Not new ones, new clothes were rare in their lives, but about
the light-weight summer clothes now to be brought out and refurbished;
turned perhaps, or dyed, embellished by a few stitches of simple
embroidery.

Susannah, shifting Joshua from one hip to the other--really the naughty
little boy grew heavier from one day to the next--said:

"You, at least, are sure of a new dress, Mary. What will you choose
?"

In Rachel's mind the word 'sackcloth' formed itself; but she did not
say it, because the others might see, behind the jest, something of her
own private little hell. Nor would it be apt. Mary's parents, unlike
her own, had allowed her to have some say in the matter, and the man
she should marry in two months' time was good and steady and looked
kind. Ephraim, probably sensing Rachel's aversion to him, had not been
kind... .

Then Rachel and Susannah and Leah became aware that Mary had made no
answer to this, surely most important and easily answered question.
They looked at her and Susannah said, "She's off again!"

They had grown up together and the three others knew that Mary had
these curious lapses; times when she seemed not to hear or see or be
with them in any but the physical sense. They'd learned from
experience to leave her alone; for five minutes or so she'd behave like
a sleep-walker, and then blink and smile and take up the chatter where