Fog of Doubt Read Online Free PDF

you went Abroad,’ said Damien, ‘so you’ve learnt something, even if it’s only a bit of geography.’
    Rosie replied with truth that she had learnt a great deal, most of it unconnected with geography.
    â€˜Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that you contribute absolutely nothing to the State as a whole.’ Damien contributed to the State as a whole from a desk in a city office where all day long he jotted down and totted up figures in the shifting columns of wealth in the despised capitalist country which so patiently suffered him.
    â€˜Well, it’s not my fault if I haven’t got a job. Damn it all, I’ve only this minute left school.’
    â€˜Many girls in this country leave school at the age of fourteen.’
    â€˜I wish I could have,’ said Rosie. ‘I simply loathed that old St. Hilda’s.’
    â€˜God knows they didn’t teach you anything worth learning.’
    â€˜They didn’t teach me anything at all,’ said Rosie. ‘They couldn’t, poor things, I was too dumb.’
    â€˜Well, there’s no room in the world to-day for helpless drones.’
    Rosie didn’t want to be a drone at all, she was simply dying, ackcherly, to get a job as a model at Paquin or somewhere like that. But if she couldn’t, well, what could they do about it? They couldn’t just have her painlessly destroyed, now could they? She wondered if, as a drone mother-to-be, she might fit in more comfortably with Damien’s uncomfortable ideas. ‘I say, Day—I wanted to talk to you about something. Well, I mean it’s about—better say a friend of mine, and the thing is, she’s—well, matter of fact, she’s going to have a baby.’
    â€˜Ah—Unmarried Mother?’ said Damien with a brightening eye.
    â€˜Well, yes, she certainly isn’t married, but if she could help it, she would like not to be a mother either.’
    â€˜Nonsense,’ said Damien. ‘Women have a right to motherhood if they want it. You tell her to stick to her guns.’
    â€˜The trouble is, they’re not so much her guns,’ said Rosie, uneasily, ‘as more of a sort of pistol to her head. I mean, she believes madly in marriage and all those—um—outworn shibboleths, Damien, because if you don’t well—well, you never get married, do you?’
    â€˜Then I’ve got no patience with her,’ said Damien. ‘She shouldn’t have given herself to her man, if she was unprepared for the burden—as things now are—of single parenthood.’
    â€˜He wasn’t her man, exactly. He was someone she—well, he was in a train, ackcherly, and there she was, she was absolutely terrified, she was young and unsophisticated and all that, and she just got scared and lost her head.…’
    â€˜All the better. Those are the children we want, children not born into the shackles of the old conventions, children who can start out from the very beginning free to believe in the—er—the freedoms; I mean free to believe in equality—and—and tolerance and—well, all those things,’ said Damien, running out of freedoms; he was not a quick study, poor boy, and all too frequently fluffed or forgot his lines; nor was he adept at striking out on his own.
    â€˜Oh, lor’! ’ said Rosie, gloomily.
    â€˜So give your friend a jolly good pat on the back from Us, and tell her to come along to a meeting we’re having at my place next Thursday. After all, one never knows,’ said Damien, waxing enthusiastic upon visions, ‘what her Unborn Child may yet turn out to be. But she isn’t one of your French friends, is she?’ he added, breaking off a little anxiously. Everybody knew what those French girls were!
    â€˜No, no, she’s English. Ackc herly,’ said Rosie, nervously, ‘you know her quite well.’ She added that