A Sport of Nature Read Online Free PDF Page B

like it at all when I told her that, did she?— And the reaction of that Calder child comes from the attitudes that secretly go with those procedures: she said what she did
innocently
. In case you’re ever tempted, girls, that’s what’s called gracious living.—
    Hillela and Joe laughed but Carole’s pallor as she withdrew into herself made her freckles stand out all over her face like a rash. In the car, she was suddenly weeping as she did when she reported: Don’t lean your smelly arm over my face.
    â€”Good god, what is it now?— Pauline accused Joe.
    â€”It’s all right for you. Now she won’t speak to me again.—
    At Olga’s house, arguments, confessions or chastisings never took place in front of others, but Pauline didn’t believe in confining weak moments and dark thoughts behind bedroom doors. —Now listen, Carole. And you too, Hillela. When you do what’s right, here, you nearly always have to give up something. Something easy and nice. You have to accept that you won’t be popular—with some people. But are they really the kind of people you want as friends? And there are a great many other people with whom you’ll be popular just because they appreciate what you’ve done.—
    â€”Where? I don’t know where they are. You, and daddy—your friends. It’s all fine for Sasha, over there up on a nice green hill in Swaziland. It’s easy for him to be what you want.—
    â€”Bettie. Alpheus. The waiters at the school—yes, maybe they’ll never know you’re the one who did it, but they’ll appreciatethe change when they’re not treated like dirt by little schoolgirls any longer.—
    â€”At school they’ll all just say I got Annette Calder into trouble over a kitchen boy. She won’t speak to Hillela, either, now.—
    Hillela did not know for whom, her cousin or Pauline, she spoke up. —I’m not keen on Annette, anyway, she’s the one who had the idea all the boys must wear suits to the end of term dance. And when we had to draw a self-portrait in the style of a famous painting, she drew herself as the Virgin Mary, blue veil and all.—
    Joe settled the back of his neck, appreciatively.
    â€”Hillela’s kicked out of that Rhodesian place (Carole stopped, to look for her way of escape if the others were to close in on her) and at this place, now, people won’t speak to her because we stick up for Africans all the time.—
    Joe drove with drooping head, as, in the political trial in which he was appearing for the Defence, he listened to State evidence. —Let us drop it, now, Pauline.—
    â€”No, no. I don’t want Hillela to be confused in any way about this. What Hillela did in Rhodesia wasn’t wrong—nothing to be guilty about, nothing—but it didn’t mean anything. She was pleasing herself, showing off a bit and taking a silly risk. When one’s very young one gets a kick out of just being defiant. But that’s anti-social, that’s all. It’s quite different from what we’ve all decided and done today. If the girls are made to suffer in some small way at school now, it’s
for something
, it’s principled. I don’t have any time for rebels without a cause.—
    But there was no consequence at the school. If the Calder girl and her parents were summoned to the headmistress’s study, the girl herself was so well-brought-up that she had already the confidence of her kind to avoid any challenge of it. Nothing short of a revolution, the possibility of which was inconceivable to such confidence, could really harm it. So why bother to defend oneself? She and her accuser, Carole, took the opportunity to pretend thewords had never been said or heard. Carole, as she moved up into senior positions in the school, became influential in the debating society and was able to introduce such subjects as