"Virginia Woolf_-_Monday_or_Tuesday" - читать интересную книгу автора (Woolf Virginia)

2. A Society


THIS is how it all came about. Six or seven of us were sitting one day
after tea. Some were gazing across the street into the windows of a
milliner's shop where the light still shone brightly upon scarlet feathers
and golden slippers. Others were idly occupied in building little towers
of sugar upon the edge of the tea tray. After a time, so far as I can
remember, we drew round the fire and began as usual to praise menЧhow
strong, how noble, how brilliant, how courageous, how beautiful they wereЧ
how we envied those who by hook or by crook managed to get attached to one
for lifeЧwhen Poll, who had said nothing, burst into tears. Poll, I must
tell you, has always been queer. For one thing her father was a strange
man. He left her a fortune in his will, but on condition that she read all
the books in the London Library. We comforted her as best we could; but we
knew in our hearts how vain it was. For though we like her, Poll is no
beauty; leaves her shoe laces untied; and must have been thinking, while
we praised men, that not one of them would ever wish to marry her. At last
she dried her tears. For some time we could make nothing of what she said.
Strange enough it was in all conscience. She told us that, as we knew, she
spent most of her time in the London Library, reading. She had begun, she
said, with English literature on the top floor; and was steadily working
her way down to the Times on the bottom. And now half, or perhaps only a
quarter, way through a terrible thing had happened. She could read no
more. Books were not what we thought them. "Books," she cried, rising to
her feet and speaking with an intensity of desolation which I shall never
forget, "are for the most part unutterably bad!"

Of course we cried out that Shakespeare wrote books, and Milton and
Shelley.

"Oh, yes," she interrupted us. "You've been well taught, I can see. But
you are not members of the London Library." Here her sobs broke forth
anew. At length, recovering a little, she opened one of the pile of books
which she always carried about with herЧ"From a Window" or "In a Garden,"
or some such name as that it was called, and it was written by a man
called Benton or Henson, or something of that kind. She read the first few
pages. We listened in silence. "But that's not a book," someone said. So
she chose another. This time it was a history, but I have forgotten the
writer's name. Our trepidation increased as she went on. Not a word of it
seemed to be true, and the style in which it was written was execrable.
"Poetry! Poetry!" we cried, impatiently.
"Read us poetry!" I cannot describe the desolation which fell upon us as
she opened a little volume and mouthed out the verbose, sentimental
foolery which it contained.

"It must have been written by a woman," one of us urged. But no. She told