"Jane Yolen - Lost Girls" - читать интересную книгу автора (Yolen Jane)

between the welcomes to eat something, she just couldn't. That small
rebellion seemed to annoy him enormously and he stood up once again,
this time on the tabletop, to rant on about how some people lacked
gratitude, and how difficult it was to provide for so many, especially with
Him about.
Peter never actually looked at Darla as he spoke, but she knewтАФ and
everyone else knewтАФthat he meant she was the ungrateful one. That
bothered her some, but not as much as it might have. She even found
herself enjoying the fact that he was annoyed, and that realization almost
made her smile.
When Peter ended with "No more Feasts for them with Bad Attitudes!"
the boys leaped from their benches and overturned the big table, mashing
the remaining food into the floor. Then they all disappeared, diving down
a variety of bolt-holes, with Tink after them, leaving the girls alone in the
big candlelit room.
"Now see what you've done," said the oldest girl, the pretty one with the
straight brown hair. Obviously the leader of the Wendys, she wore a
simple dark dress тАФ like a uniform, Darla thought, a school uniform
that's badly stained. "It's going to take forever to get that stuff off the
floor. Ages and ages. Mops and buckets. And nothing left for us to eat."
The other girls agreed loudly.
"They made the mess," Darla said sensibly. "Let them clean it up! That's
how it's done at my house."
 There was a horrified silence. For a moment none of the girls said a
word, but their mouths opened and shut like fish on beaches. Finally the
littlest one spoke.
"Peter won't 'ike it."
"Well, I don't 'ike Peter!" Darla answered quickly. "He's nothing but a
long-winded bully."
"But," said the little Wendy, "you gave him a thimble." She actually said
"simble."
"No," Darla said. "Peter lied. I didn't."
The girls all seemed dumbstruck by that revelation. Without a word
more, they began to clean the room, first righting the table and then
laboriously picking up what they could with their fingers before resorting,
at last, to the dreaded buckets and mops. Soon the place smelled like any
institution after a cleaning, like a school bathroom or a hospital corridor,
Lysol-fresh with an overcast of pine.
Shaking her head, Darla just watched them until the littlest Wendy
handed her a mop.
Darla flung the mop to the floor. "I won't do it," she said. "It's not fair."
The oldest Wendy came over to her and put her hand on Darla's
shoulder. "Who ever told you that life is fair?" she asked. "Certainly not a
navvy, nor an upstairs maid, nor a poor man trying to feed his family."
"Nor my da," put in one of the girls. She was pale skinned, sharp nosed,
gap toothed, homely to a fault. "He allas said life was a crapshoot and all
usn's got was snake-eyes."
"And not my father," said another, a whey-faced, doughy-looking
eight-year-old. "He used to always say that the world didn't treat him
right."