Отрывок из книги
Louis Bromfield
Published by Good Press, 2021
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The terror and astonishment of the long journey still clung to him and the memory of the strange rough people packed like cattle in the part of the train ahead of the Parlor-Saloon car, the sight of the Chinese and the Irish at the tank stops. At home laborers like the Irish knew their places. They did not make mocking remarks about people’s clothes nor bawdy sounds at the sight of someone like Mademoiselle da Ponte. In this new country there didn’t seem to be any distinctions of class except, of course, those of money which created the colossal gap between the people in the railway carriages ahead and those in the Parlor-Saloon car.
Both Professor da Ponte and Mademoiselle da Ponte had disturbed him, for in the narrow circle of life at the vicarage, in the sleepy scholastic life at Oxford, or even in the rare trips to London, he had never seen anything like them. He had actually found himself unable to speak in response to the overcordial, loquacious sallies of the glib-tongued Professor himself. He had tried to rationalize them and protect himself psychologically by telling himself that the pair—the Professor and the young diva—were something out of Dickens like the Crummles family in Nicholas Nickleby.
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