Читать книгу Indian Summer - Emily Grant Hutchings - Страница 12

It was the ninth day of her tenancy at Vine Cottage, and she and Dr. Schubert were already old friends. With the exception of a reference to Eileen, whom the quality rather than the content of his allusion marked as his favourite, he had studiously avoided any comment on the Trenches that would serve to divert the free flow of her own sensitive perception. Larimore and Sydney Schubert were of about the same age—had been intimate friends from boyhood. Syd’s affection for Lary, at one period of his youth, had overflowed and engulfed Sylvia. But Mrs. Trench had set her face sternly against any such alliance. “The obstacle seems to have been that intangible thing, a discrepancy in age—on the wrong side of the ledger,” the physician explained. “There is one woman,” he stressed the first word extravagantly, his eyes twinkling, “who has the whole scheme of life crystallized. With most of us, certain problems remain fluid. Mrs. Trench knows. The eternal verities don’t admit of argument. My boy was only a medical student when he went mooning after Sylvia, but his prospects were good. If he had been born the day before—instead of lagging a stupid sixteen months after the girl—it would have been all right for her to wait ten years for him. As it was, he simply wouldn’t do. Mrs. Trench objected to Walter Marksley on entirely different grounds. Mrs. Trench is strong for the moral code, and Walter kept a fairly luxuriant crop of wild oats in his front yard.... But my dear, my dear, I’m developing the garrulity that is a sure harbinger of old age. Don’t let a word I’ve been saying serve to bias you in your estimate of your landlady. I assure you, she’s a trump.”