Friendship Village

Оглавление

Gale Zona. Friendship Village

I. THE SIDE DOOR

II. THE DÉBUT

III. NOBODY SICK, NOBODY POOR

IV. COVERS FOR SEVEN

V. THE SHADOW OF GOOD THINGS TO COME

VI. STOCK

VII. THE BIG WIND

VIII. THE GRANDMA LADIES

IX "NOT AS THE WORLD GIVETH"

X. LONESOME. – I

XI. LONESOME. – II

XII. OF THE SKY AND SOME ROSEMARY

XIII. TOP FLOOR BACK

XIV. AN EPILOGUE

XV. THE TEA PARTY

XVI. WHAT IS THAT IN THINE HAND?

XVII. PUT ON THY BEAUTIFUL GARMENTS

XVIII. IN THE WILDERNESS A CEDAR

XIX. HERSELF

XX. THE HIDINGS OF POWER

Отрывок из книги

Mrs. Ricker, "washens, scrubben, work by the day or Our," as the sign of her own lettering announced, had come into a little fortune by the death of her first husband, Al Kitton, early divorced and late repentant. Just before my arrival in Friendship she had bought a respectable frame house in the heart of the village, – for a village will have a heart instead of having a boulevard, – and with her daughter Emerel she had set up a modest establishment with Ingrain carpets and parlour pieces, and a bit of grass in front. Thus Emerel Kitton – we, in our simple, penultimate way, called it Kitten – became a kind of heiress. She had been christened Emma Ella, but her mother, of her love of order, had tidied the name to Emerel, and Friendship had adopted the form, perhaps as having about it something pleasing and jewel-like. Though Emerel was in the thirties at the time of her inheritance, she was still pretty, shy, conformable; and yet there was no disguising that she was nearly a spinster when, as soon as the white house was settled, Mrs. Ricker issued invitations to her daughter's coming-out party.

the invitations said, and the "Pa" was divined to imply "Please answer."

.....

I had no objection in the world to any one knowing my opinion of Mis' Postmaster Sykes's proceeding, – "one of her preposterousnesses," Calliope called it, – and I said so, and set off for Mrs. Ricker's, while Calliope herself flew somewhere else on some last mission. And, "Mis' Sykes'd ought to be showed," she called to me over-shoulder. "That woman's got a sinful pride. She'd wear fur in August to prove she could afford to hev moths!"

The Ricker parlour was a garden which sloped gently, as a garden should, for the house was old and the parlour floor sagged toward the entrance so that the front of the organ was propped on wooden blocks. The room was bedizened with flowers, in dishes, tins, and gallon jars, so that it seemed some way an alien thing, like a prune horse. On the lamp shelf was the huge white carnation pillow, across which the hostess had inscribed "welcom," in stems.

.....