"BAB A SUB-DEB" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rinehart Mary Roberts)

the Plow, I did not intend to steer a crooked course. I would go
straight to the end. I am like that in everything I do. But, on
delibarating things over, I felt that Violets, alone and
unsuported, were not enough. I felt that If I had a photograph,
it would make everything more real. After all, what is a love
affair without a picture of the Beloved Object?
So I bought a photograph. It was hard to find what I
wanted, but I got it at last in a stationer's shop, a young man
in a checked suit with a small mustache--the young man, of
course, not the suit. Unluckaly, he was rather blonde, and had
a dimple in his chin. But he looked exactly as though his name
ought to be Harold.
I may say here that I chose "Harold," not because it is a
favorite name of mine, but because it is romantic in sound. Also
because I had never known any one named Harold and it seemed
only discrete.
I took it home in my muff and put it under my pillow where
Hannah would find it and probably take it to mother. I wanted to
buy a ring too, to hang on a ribbon around my neck. But the
violets had made a fearful hole in my thirteen dollars.
I borrowed a stub pen at the stationer's and I wrote on the
photograph, in large, sprawling letters, "To _you_ from _me_."
"There," I said to myself, when I put it under the pillow.
"You look like a photograph, but you are really a bomb-shell."
As things eventuated, it was. More so, indeed.
Mother sent for me when I came in. She was sitting in front
of her mirror, having the vibrater used on her hair, and her
manner was changed. I guessed that there had been a family
Counsel over the poem, and that they had decided to try
kindness.
"Sit down, Barbara," she said. "I hope you were not lonely
last night?"
"I am never lonely, mother. I always have things to think
about."
I said this in a very pathetic tone.
"What sort of things?" mother asked, rather sharply.
"Oh--things," I said vaguely. "Life is such a mess, isn't
it?"
"Certainly not. Unless one makes it so."
"But it is so difficult. Things come up and--and it's hard
to know what to do. The only way, I suppose, is to be true to
one's beleif in one's self."
"Take that thing off my head and go out, Hannah," mother
snapped. "Now then, Barbara, what in the world has come over
you?"
"Over me? Nothing."
"You are being a silly child."
"I am no longer a child, mother. I am seventeen. And at
seventeen there are problems. After all, one's life is one's
own. One must decide----"