The Aloe Read Online Free PDF Page B

of bed now, fling on my clothes, rush downstairs, tear up a ladder, hang pictures, eat an enormous lunch, romp with the children in the garden this afternoon and be swinging on the gate, waving, when Stanley hove in sight this evening I believe you’d be delighted – A normal, healthy day for a young wife and mother – A—”
    Mrs Fairfield began to smile. “How absurd you are – How you exaggerate! What a baby you are,” said she.
    But Linda sat up suddenly and jerked off the “wooly”.
    “I’m boiling, I’m roasting,” she declared. “I can’t think what I’m doing in this big, stuffy old bed – I’m going to get up.”
    “Very well, dear,” said Mrs Fairfield –
    Getting dressed never took her long. Her hands flew. She had beautiful hands, white and tiny. The only trouble with them was that they would not keep her rings on them. Happily she only had two rings, her wedding ring and a peculiarly hideous affair, a square slab with four pin opals in it that Stanley had “stolen from a cracker” said Linda, the day they were engaged. But it was her wedding ring that disappeared so. It fell down every possible place and into every possible corner. Once she even found it in the crown of her hat. It was a familiar cry in the house “Linda’s wedding ring has gone again” – Stanley Burnell could never hear that without a horrible sense of discomfort. Good Lord! he wasn’t superstitious – He left that kind of rot to people who had nothing better to think about – but all the same, it was devilishly annoying. Especially as Linda made so light of the affair and mocked him and said “are they as expensive as all that” and laughed at him and cried, holding up her bare hand – “Look, Stanley, it has all been a dream.” He was a fool to mind things like that, but they hurt him – they hurt like sin.
    “Funny I should have dreamed about Papa last night” thought Linda, brushing her cropped hair that stood up all over her head in little bronzy rings. “What was it I dreamed?” No, she’d forgotten – “Something or other about a bird.” But Papa was very plain – his lazy ambling walk. And she laid down the brush and went over to the marble mantelpiece and leaned her arms along it, her chin in her hands, and looked at his photograph. In his photograph he showed severe and imposing – a high brow, a piercing eye, clean shaven except for long “piccadilly weepers” draping his bosom. He was taken in the fashion of that time, standing, one arm on the back of a tapestry chair, the other clenched upon a parchment roll. “Papa!” said Linda, she smiled. “There you are my dear,” she breathed, and then she shook her head quickly and frowned and went on with her dressing.
    Her Father had died the year that she married Burnell, the year of her sixteenth birthday. All her childhood had been passed in a long white house perched on a hill overlooking Wellington harbour – a house with a wild garden full of bushes and fruit-trees, long, thick grass and nasturtiums. Nasturtiums grew everywhere – there was no fighting them down. They even fell in a shower over the paling fence on to the road. Red, yellow, white, every possible colour; they lighted the garden like swarms of butterflies. The Fairfields were a large family of boys and girls with their beautiful mother and their gay, fascinating father (for it was only in his photograph that he looked stern) they were quite a “show” family and immensely admired. Mr Fairfield managed a small insurance business that could not have been very profitable, yet they lived plentifully. He had a good voice; he liked to sing in public, he liked to dance and attend picnics – to put on his “bell topper” and walk out of Church if he disapproved of anything said in the sermon – and he had a passion for inventing highly unpracticable things, like collapsible umbrellas or folding lamps. He had one saying with which he met all difficulties. “Depend upon