"Sorensen, Virginia - Plain Girl" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sorensen Virginia)

"I like you!" said the girl in pink. "My name is Mary."

Mary was the most beautiful and important name in the world for a girl. Esther had always thought so. This Mary, her skin as rosy as her dress, had hair
that fell in little golden curls like wisps of silk. Sometimes a curl almost went into Esther's ink-bottle. It never

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quite went in, but brushed over. Esther reached out once and moved the curl away. It was exactly like the silk in a milkweed pod. It felt like a downy feather.
It was so beautiful it made a shiver go through her fingers, and her heart suddenly beat very fast.

Father would not like her to be friends with Mary, or even to look at her. If anybody in the world was really different from Esther herself and all her
people, that one was Mary. She wore pink one day and blue the next and then yellow, but Esther liked pink the best. She laughed a good deal. She tossed
her hair when the boys chased her in the games at recess, and squealed when they caught her. All the other girls wanted to walk by her side and whisper
with her, back and forth. Even when she did not wear the pink dress, Esther still thought of her as The Pink Girl. This was because of her pretty skin
and her hands, on which she wore two small rings. Then her knees were pink and her plump legs, which were bare from her little socks upward until they
vanished in her fluffy skirt. Mary was like the pretty girls made of glass in shop windows.

"How beautiful you are!" Esther thought many times a day.

One morning Mary turned around with a smile

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during the writing exercise. "I'm writing you a letter," she said. "Why don't you write one to me?"

Esther looked at the pencil in her hand. She had been making great A's and B's and C's and all the other letters in perfect rows. She knew how to put some
of them together; she could make a great many words. But she knew she should not think about writing a letter to Mary. Father had said, "You will not look
at the other children," and already she looked at Mary all the time, as much as possible. Writing a letter would be worse than looking, she knew that without
being told. She went on making A's and B's and C's in perfect rows.

Soon Mary turned around again. She slipped a folded paper onto Esther's desk.

"Haven't you written mine yet?" she whispered.

Esther's mouth felt dry and she swallowed deeply before she could answer. "Not yet," she said.

It was like a promise. She had not meant it to be, but it was. Mary smiled and said, "It gets easier and easier to write. You'll learn soon. Letters are
good practice." She turned back to her desk.

The folded note lay on Esther's desk. She looked at it for a long time before she touched it. Was receiving a letter as bad as writing one? Father received
letters from seed companies and from the school officials and

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many others who lived outside the neighborhood. After all, if somebody sent you a letter, it wasn't your' fault, was it? She thought of Dan here in the
schoolroom year after year. Did somebody in pink send letters to Dan? Or maybe somebody with buttons on his coat? All the boys had buttons on their coats.