Читать книгу Mrs. Engels - Gavin McCrea - Страница 15

X. A Free Education

I’m not clever with the needle. I can’t keep my mind full on it. When it comes time for it—this hour after lunch is the usual, though I’m told some ladies can’t stop and have to have it torn from them at bedtime as a babby from the breast—but, aye, when the lunch is cleared and way is made for the buttons and patches, I’m hindered from settling into it by a draft that, no matter what the weather outside, comes under the door and cuts into me like a knife.

Over my shoulder, it does blow, and into my ear. Then, whirling in my head, it swings my weathercock round and points it backwards and northwards, and sets me to believing that because I’ve done my time spinning cotton, I ought be handy at this fancywork too. “Lord bless us and save us, Lizzie Burns,” the wind roars. “All those years at the mill and you can’t do a simple cross-stitch?”

I know it’s only the devil trying to make me pucker a seam or prick my finger; it’s only himself trying for my soul before the Lord calls for it. So I try to pay no heed. Though it gives me an ache to have to listen to him, speeching off like one of the mill men—“What we do today, London does tomorrow!”—or whistling the sound of the mule, dandier to him than a lark, I make as if I’m taken up with the feeding of thread and the making of loops, for I don’t need to answer for myself.