Читать книгу This Shining Woman - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 10

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The house was quiet, but Mary could not sleep. She took the large volume of Paradise Lost from the shelf over her bed and read it by the light of the farthing dip that she had made herself from one of the rushes of the lake nearby. The descriptions of Paradise only aroused in Mary, hungry, sore from her father's blows, lonely and hopeless, a sad contempt. She turned the pages, and her tired eyes caught the lines:

"To whom thus Eve with perfect beauty adorn'd. My Author and Disposer, what thou bidst Unargued I obey; so God ordains; God is thy Law, Thou mine; to know no more Is Woman's happiest knowledge and her praise."

Mary knew these lines by heart, but she felt a certain relief in turning the pages of the heavy book, in peering at the faded sepia words.

John Milton thought that God had set men over women, who were to obey them without question. Meekness and beauty, then, were all that women needed. Mary thought of her mother, of herself and her sisters, and closed the book. The ugly, brutal, indecent scenes that she had been forced to witness passed before her mind—all to be endured because she was a woman! She blew out the light—even a rush dip must not be wasted—crept into bed and drew her ragged coverlet over her shoulders. Through the thin partition of the patched room she could hear the gross snores of the drunkard who was her master, from the loft where her sisters slept, the shrill, nervous cries of the two girls in their uneasy sleep.