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قراءة كتاب The Pride of Eve

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‏اللغة: English
The Pride of Eve

The Pride of Eve

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دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
الصفحة رقم: 7

inside it. This building was fitted with a big clock that boomed solemnly at regular intervals, always making the same sound, and making it as though it were uttering some new and striking note.

“I see you are one of those, Mr. Canterton, who like to let children run wild.”

“I suppose I am. I’d rather my child had fine legs and a good appetite to begin with.”

His wife joined in.

“Lynette could not read when she was six.”

“That was a gross crime, Gertrude, to be sure.”

“It might be called symptomatic.”

“Mrs. Brocklebank, my wife is too conscientious for some of us.”

“Can one be too conscientious, Mr. Canterton?”

“Well, I can never imagine Gertrude with holes in her stockings, or playing at honey-pots. I believe you wrote a prize essay when you were eleven, Gertrude, and the subject was, ‘How to teach children to play in earnest.’ If you’ll excuse me, I have to see Lavender about one of the hothouses before I dress for dinner.”

He left them together, sitting like two solemn china figures nodding their heads over his irresponsible love of laissez-faire. Mrs. Brocklebank had no children, but she was a great authority upon them, in a kind of pathological way.

“I think you ought to make a stand, Gertrude.”

“The trouble is, my husband’s ideas run the same way as the child’s inclinations. I think I must get rid of Miss Vance. She is too easygoing.”

“The child ought soon to be old enough to go to school. Let me see, how old is she?”

“Seven.”

“Send her away next year. There is that very excellent school at Cheltenham managed by Miss Sandys. She was a wrangler, you know, and is an LL.D. Her ideas are absolutely sound. Psychological discipline is one of her great points.”

“I must speak to James about it. He is such a difficult man to deal with. So immovable, and always turning things into a kind of quiet laughter.”

“I know. Most difficult—most baffling.”

Though three people sat down at the dinner table, it was a diner à deux so far as the conversation was concerned. The women discussed the Primrose League Fête, and Lord Parallax, whom Gertrude Canterton had found rather disappointing. From mere local topics they travelled into the wilderness of eugenics, Mrs. Brocklebank treating of Mendelism, and talking as though Canterton had never heard of Mendel. It amused him to listen to her, especially since the work of such master men as Mendel and De Vries formed part of the intimate inspiration of his own study of the strange beauty of growth. Mrs. Brocklebank appeared to have muddled up Mendelism with Galton’s theory of averages. She talked sententiously of pure dominants and recessives, got her figures badly mixed, and uttered some really astonishing things that would have thrilled a scientific audience.

Yet it was dreary stuff when devitalised by Mrs. Brocklebank’s pompous inexactitudes, especially when accompanied by an interminable cracking of nuts. She always ended lunch and dinner with nuts, munching them slowly and solemnly, exaggerating her own resemblance to a white cow chewing the cud.

Canterton escaped upstairs, passed Miss Vance on the landing, a motherly young woman with rich brown hair, and made his way to the nursery. The room was full of the twilight, and through the open window came the last notes of a thrush. Lynette was lying in a white bed with a green coverlet. Her mother had ordered a pink bedspread, but Miss Vance had thought of Lynette’s hair.

Canterton sat on the edge of the bed.

“Well, Princess, are you a pure dominant?”

“I’ve said my prayers, daddy.”

“Oh, that’s good—very good! I wonder how the feast is getting on in the Wilderness?”

“They won’t come out yet, not till the moon shines.”

“Think of their little silver slippers twinkling like dewdrops on the grass.”

“I wish I could see them, daddy. Have you ever seen a fairy?”

“I think I’ve caught a glimpse of one, now and again. But you have to be ever so good to see fairies.”

“You ought to have seen lots, then, daddy.”

He laughed, the quiet, meditative laugh of the man wise in his own humility.

“There are more wonderful things than fairies, Lynette. I’ll tell you about them some day.”

“Yes, do.”

She sat up in bed, her hair a dark flowing mass about her slim face and throat, and Canterton was reminded of some exquisite white bud that promised to be an exquisite flower.

“Let’s have some rhymes, daddy.”

“What, more Bed Ballads?”

“Yes.”

“What shall we start with?”

“Begin with cat.”

“All right, let’s see what turns up:

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