Ghosts and Other Lovers Read Online Free PDF

greater luxury of being allowed to do nothing at all.
    In a family of hard workers, Eustacia was the lazy one. Lydia, too, had disliked the labor required of daughters in a house without servants, but Lydia was never idle. She enjoyed sewing, particularly embroidery and fine needlework, loved music, and was often to be found reading improving books. Whatever time she could steal from chores she invested in her own artistic and intellectual pursuits. Eustacia, on the other hand, enjoyed conversation and reading novels, but was happiest doing nothing. She liked to sleep, she liked to dream, she liked to muse and build castles in the air, sitting by the fire in the winter, or beneath a shady tree in the summer.
    Although Mildred and Constance often castigated Eustacia for laziness, Lydia had formed an alliance with her, believing her younger sister was, like herself, of an artistic temperament. She encouraged Eustacia to forget her present woes by thinking of the happiness that would be hers in a few years, once she was married and the mistress of her own household. She, after all, had married well: a man who gave her a piano as a birthday present, and paid for private lessons. Their house in town was staffed by a cook, two maids, and a manservant, and there was a boy who came to do the garden twice a week. Lydia's husband was not rich, but he was, as they said, "comfortable," as well as being very much in love with his wife. Lydia was not so vulgar as to propose that Eustacia "marry money," but her husband knew a number of young men who were up and coming in the business world; men who would soon be able to afford a wife. It was to give Eustacia a chance of meeting an appropriate mate that Lydia often invited her to stay and took her out to concerts, soirées, balls, and other social gatherings.
    Eustacia went along with Lydia wherever and whenever she was asked, but wasn't sure she believed marriage was the answer. She was not beautiful; more fatally, she lacked the personal charm that made men dote on Lydia. She might find a husband, but surely not romance. And even if she managed to marry a man who loved her, who was not a farmer, not poor, and not a petty tyrant like her father, her fate might still be that of her mother: to bear ten live children in twelve years, and die of exhaustion. She was not eager to exchange one form of servitude for another.
    In the bedroom she had once shared with Lydia and Constance but now had to herself, Eustacia laid a fire in the hearth. The clear, sticky muck on her hands transferred itself to logs and paper but they burned with no apparent ill effect. When the fire was drawing nicely, she undressed and put on her nightgown. By that time she was yawning mightily, and as soon as she had crawled into bed she felt herself slipping deliciously into sleep.
    When she woke the next morning her eyes were sticky, the lashes so gummed together that it was a struggle to open them; and it was not only her eyes which were affected. All over her face, her head, her hands, her upper body, she could feel the tight, sticky pull of dried mucus. It was there like spiderwebs, or a welter of snail tracks, criss-crossing her face, looping around her neck, her arms, and dried stiffly in her hair. She felt a myriad cracks open as her face convulsed in disgust. A tortured moan escaped her lips as she scrambled out of bed. The water in the pitcher was icy cold, but for once she didn't mind, scarcely even noticed, as she splashed it onto hands and face and neck and chest, splashing it everywhere in a panic to get the slimy stuff off. It was not cold but revulsion which made her shiver.
    Eustacia was not the excessively sensitive, refined creature contemporary manners held women should be. The daughter of a working farmer could not afford a weak stomach, but Eustacia knew that she was not so fastidious, not so "nice," as her sisters, and this was a matter of some shame to her. Sometimes it made her angry. It wasn't