Mrs. Lorch and her daughter lived half a mile from the Swedish Reform Church, in an old square frame house, with a porch supported by frail1 pillars, set in a damp yard full of big lilac bushes. The house, which had been left over from country times, needed paint badly, and looked gloomy and despondent2 among its smart Queen Anne neighbors. There was a big back yard with two rows of apple trees and a grape arbor3, and a warped4 walk, two planks5 wide, which led to the coal bins6 at the back of the lot. Thea’s room was on the second floor, overlooking this back yard, and she understood that in the winter she must carry up her own coal and kindling8 from the bin7. There was no furnace in the house, no running water except in the kitchen, and that was why the room rent was small. All the rooms were heated by stoves, and the lodgers9 pumped the water they needed from the cistern10 under the porch, or from the well at the entrance of the grape arbor. Old Mrs. Lorch could never bring herself to have costly11 improvements made in her house; indeed she had very little money. She preferred to keep the house just as her husband built it, and she thought her way of living good enough for plain people.
Thea’s room was large enough to admit a rented upright piano without crowding. It was, the widowed daughter said, “a double room that had always before been occupied by two gentlemen”; the piano now took the place of a second occupant. There was an ingrain carpet on the floor, green ivy12 leaves on a red ground, and clumsy, old-fashioned walnut13 furniture. The bed was very wide, and the mattress14 thin and hard. Over the fat pillows were “shams” embroidered15 in Turkey red, each with a flowering scroll—one with “Gute’ Nacht,” the other with “Guten Morgen.” The dresser was so big that Thea wondered how it had ever been got into the house and up the narrow stairs. Besides an old horsehair armchair, there were two low plush “spring-rockers,” against the massive pedestals of which one was always stumbling in the dark. Thea sat in the dark a good deal those first weeks, and sometimes a painful bump against one of those brutally16 immovable pedestals roused her temper and pulled her out of a heavy hour. The wall-paper was brownish yellow, with blue flowers. When it was put on, the carpet, certainly, had not been consulted. There was only one picture on the wall when Thea moved in: a large colored print of a brightly lighted church in a snow-storm, on Christmas Eve, with greens hanging about the stone doorway17 and arched windows. There was something warm and home, like about this picture, and Thea grew fond of it. One day, on her way into town to take her lesson, she stopped at a bookstore and bought a photograph of the Naples bust18 of Julius Caesar. This she had framed, and hung it on the big bare wall behind her stove. It was a curious choice, but she was at the age when people do inexplicable19 things. She had been interested in Caesar’s “Commentaries” when she left school to begin teaching, and she loved to read about great generals; but these facts would scarcely explain her wanting that grim bald head to share her daily existence. It seemed a strange freak, when she bought so few things, and when she had, as Mrs. Andersen said to Mrs. Lorch, “no pictures of the composers at all.”
Both the widows were kind to her, but Thea liked the mother better. Old Mrs. Lorch was fat and jolly, with a red face, always shining as if she had just come from the stove, bright little eyes, and hair of several colors. Her own hair was one cast of iron-gray, her switch another, and her false front still another. Her clothes always smelled of savory20 cooking, except when she was dressed for church or Kaffeeklatsch, and then she smelled of bay rum or of the lemon-verbena sprig which she tucked inside her puffy black kid glove. Her cooking justified21 all that Mr. Larsen had said of it, and Thea had never been so well nourished before.
The daughter, Mrs. Andersen,—Irene, her mother called her,—was a different sort of woman altogether. She was perhaps forty years old, angular, big-boned, with large, thin features, light-blue eyes, and dry, yellow hair, the bang tightly frizzed. She was pale, anaemic, and sentimental22. She had married the youngest son of a rich, arrogant23 Swedish family who were lumber24 merchants in St. Paul. There she dwelt during her married life. Oscar Andersen was a strong, full-blooded fellow who had counted on a long life and had been rather careless about his business affairs. He was killed by the explosion of a steam boiler25 in the mills, and his brothers managed to prove that he had very little stock in the big business. They had strongly disapproved26 of his marriage and they agreed among themselves that they were entirely27 justified in defrauding28 his widow, who, they said, “would only marry again and give some fellow a good thing of it.” Mrs. Andersen would not go to law with the family that had always snubbed and wounded her—she felt the humiliation29 of being thrust out more than she felt her impoverishment30; so she went back to Chicago to live with her widowed mother on an income of five hundred a year. This experience had given her sentimental nature an incurable31 hurt. Something withered32 away in her. Her head had a downward droop33; her step was soft and apologetic, even in her mother’s house, and her smile had the sickly, uncertain flicker34 that so often comes from a secret humiliation. She was affable and yet shrinking, like one who has come down in the world, who has known better clothes, better carpets, better people, brighter hopes. Her husband was buried in the Andersen lot in St. Paul, with a locked iron fence around it. She had to go to his eldest35 brother for the key when she went to say good-bye to his grave. She clung to the Swedish Church because it had been her husband’s church.
As her mother had no room for her household belongings36, Mrs. Andersen had brought home with her only her bedroom set, which now furnished her own room at Mrs. Lorch’s. There she spent most of her time, doing fancywork or writing letters to sympathizing German friends in St. Paul, surrounded by keepsakes and photographs of the burly Oscar Andersen. Thea, when she was admitted to this room, and shown these photographs, found herself wondering, like the Andersen family, why such a lusty, gay-looking fellow ever thought he wanted this pallid37, long-cheeked woman, whose manner was always that of withdrawing, and who must have been rather thin-blooded even as a girl.
Mrs. Andersen was certainly a depressing person. It sometimes annoyed Thea very much to hear her insinuating38 knock on the door, her flurried explanation of why she had come, as she backed toward the stairs. Mrs. Andersen admired Thea greatly. She thought it a distinction to be even a “temporary soprano”—Thea called herself so quite seriously—in the Swedish Church. She also thought it distinguished39 to be a pupil of Harsanyi’s. She considered Thea very handsome, very Swedish, very talented. She fluttered about the upper floor when Thea was practicing. In short, she tried to make a heroine of her, just as Tillie Kronborg had always done, and Thea was conscious of something of the sort. When she was working and heard Mrs. Andersen tip-toeing past her door, she used to shrug40 her shoulders and wonder whether she was always to have a Tillie diving furtively41 about her in some disguise or other.
At the dressmaker’s Mrs. Andersen recalled Tillie even more painfully. After her first Sunday in Mr. Larsen’s choir42, Thea saw that she must have a proper dress for morning service. Her Moonstone party dress might do to wear in the evening, but she must have one frock that could stand the light of day. She, of course, knew nothing about Chicago dressmakers, so she let Mrs. Andersen take her to a German woman whom she recommended warmly. The German dressmaker was excitable and dramatic. Concert dresses, she said, were her specialty43. In her fitting-room there were photographs of singers in the dresses she had made them for this or that Sängerfest. She and Mrs. Andersen together achieved a costume which would have warmed Tillie Kronborg’s heart. It was clearly intended for a woman of forty, with violent tastes. There seemed to be a piece of every known fabric44 in it somewhere. When it came home, and was spread out on her huge bed, Thea looked it over and told herself candidly45 that it was “a horror.” However, her money was gone, and there was nothing to do but make the best of the dress. She never wore it except, as she said, “to sing in,” as if it were an unbecoming uniform. When Mrs. Lorch and Irene told her that she “looked like a little bird-of-Paradise in it,” Thea shut her teeth and repeated to herself words she had learned from Joe Giddy and Spanish Johnny.
In these two good women Thea found faithful friends, and in their house she found the quiet and peace which helped her to support the great experiences of that winter.
点击
收听单词发音
收听单词发音 |
1
frail
|
|
| adj.身体虚弱的；易损坏的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
2
despondent
|
|
| adj.失望的，沮丧的，泄气的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
3
arbor
|
|
| n.凉亭；树木 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
4
warped
|
|
| adj.反常的；乖戾的；（变）弯曲的；变形的v.弄弯，变歪( warp的过去式和过去分词 )；使（行为等）不合情理，使乖戾， | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
5
planks
|
|
| （厚）木板( plank的名词复数 )； 政纲条目，政策要点 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
6
bins
|
|
| n.大储藏箱( bin的名词复数 )；宽口箱（如面包箱，垃圾箱等）v.扔掉，丢弃( bin的第三人称单数 ) | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
7
bin
|
|
| n.箱柜；vt.放入箱内；[计算机] DOS文件名:二进制目标文件 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
8
kindling
|
|
| n. 点火, 可燃物 动词kindle的现在分词形式 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
9
lodgers
|
|
| n.房客，租住者( lodger的名词复数 ) | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
10
cistern
|
|
| n.贮水池 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
11
costly
|
|
| adj.昂贵的，价值高的，豪华的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
12
ivy
|
|
| n.常青藤，常春藤 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
13
walnut
|
|
| n.胡桃，胡桃木，胡桃色，茶色 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
14
mattress
|
|
| n.床垫，床褥 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
15
embroidered
|
|
| adj．绣花的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
16
brutally
|
|
| adv.残忍地，野蛮地，冷酷无情地 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
17
doorway
|
|
| n.门口，(喻)入门；门路，途径 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
18
bust
|
|
| vt.打破；vi.爆裂；n.半身像；胸部 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
19
inexplicable
|
|
| adj.无法解释的，难理解的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
20
savory
|
|
| adj.风味极佳的，可口的，味香的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
21
justified
|
|
| a.正当的，有理的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
22
sentimental
|
|
| adj.多愁善感的，感伤的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
23
arrogant
|
|
| adj.傲慢的，自大的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
24
lumber
|
|
| n.木材，木料；v.以破旧东西堆满；伐木；笨重移动 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
25
boiler
|
|
| n.锅炉；煮器(壶，锅等) | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
26
disapproved
|
|
| v.不赞成( disapprove的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
27
entirely
|
|
| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
28
defrauding
|
|
| v.诈取，骗取( defraud的现在分词 ) | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
29
humiliation
|
|
| n.羞辱 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
30
impoverishment
|
|
| n.贫穷，穷困；贫化 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
31
incurable
|
|
| adj.不能医治的，不能矫正的，无救的；n.不治的病人，无救的人 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
32
withered
|
|
| adj. 枯萎的，干瘪的，（人身体的部分器官）因病萎缩的或未发育良好的 动词wither的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
33
droop
|
|
| v.低垂，下垂；凋萎，萎靡 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
34
flicker
|
|
| vi./n.闪烁，摇曳，闪现 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
35
eldest
|
|
| adj.最年长的，最年老的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
36
belongings
|
|
| n.私人物品，私人财物 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
37
pallid
|
|
| adj.苍白的，呆板的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
38
insinuating
|
|
| adj.曲意巴结的，暗示的v.暗示( insinuate的现在分词 )；巧妙或迂回地潜入；（使）缓慢进入；慢慢伸入 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
39
distinguished
|
|
| adj.卓越的，杰出的，著名的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
40
shrug
|
|
| v.耸肩(表示怀疑、冷漠、不知等) | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
41
furtively
|
|
| adv. 偷偷地, 暗中地 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
42
choir
|
|
| n.唱诗班，唱诗班的席位，合唱团，舞蹈团；v.合唱 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
43
specialty
|
|
| n.(speciality)特性，特质；专业，专长 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
44
fabric
|
|
| n.织物，织品，布；构造，结构，组织 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
45
candidly
|
|
| adv.坦率地，直率而诚恳地 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
| 欢迎访问英文小说网 |