Venus of Dreams Read Online Free PDF Page B

but maybe I shouldn't. I might like a pretty dark-skinned daughter."
    Iris wanted to scream, unable to bear the thought of a sister who might be like Durell. How could her mother even think of it?
    "Another daughter?" Wenda shook her head. "That might not be wise. You'd have to turn the farm over to one of them eventually, and the other might resent it."
    "But a girl could stay here with us," LaDonna said. "I'm glad this one's going to be a girl. Tyree will have to leave us when he's older, but I'll still have his sister, and she's bound to be a lot like him, after all."
    The other women were silent for a moment. LaDonna had reminded them all of an awkward fact; LaDonna, who could have chosen almost any man, had become pregnant by the same man who had fathered Tyree. No one could understand such unconventionality; it made no sense. Having two children by only one man was almost like having a bond with him.
    "I think you ought to wait," Constance said. "You know what it was like with Iris and my Eric born so close together. We wouldn't want to lose the labor of two women at the same time. We were exhausted trying to keep up with everything."
    "You're right," Angharad replied. "I've got time. I'm twenty-four now—I could even wait until Iris is grown, see how things are then. I don't know." An odd, unhappy look came over Angharad's round face; her brown eyes seemed to be staring into a secret place only she could see. Iris had caught that look on her mother's face when Angharad had not realized she was present. "I wonder." She shook her head and smiled again.
    "You sound worried." Old Wenda waved an arm. "What are you thinking—that Iris will grow so addled by her learning that you'll need another daughter to tend to things here?"
    Iris held her breath, wishing that Julia were awake and in the courtyard to say something in her defense.
    "Of course not," Angharad answered. "Iris isn't addled. She's better behaved than a lot of children." She glanced at Constance; Eric sometimes beat the walls with his fists or shrieked when he was denied a game or treat, and since he wasted his own allotment, his mother often had to refuse his requests for part of hers. "Iris will do very well." The eavesdropping girl loved her mother at that moment, wishing Angharad would say such things to her more often when they were alone. "Besides, it's a stage. She'll get tired of it soon enough, especially when it starts getting hard. When she gets old enough for a man, she'll find other things are more interesting."
    The women chuckled. Iris's eyes stung. Was that true? She couldn't believe that she would ever want someone like Durell, loud and boorish and full of himself. A man would never take her away from her studies. She would prefer not to have a man at all. She tensed, surprised at the thought. There were a few women in Lincoln who had only other women as lovers or took no lovers at all, and though they were tolerated, most of the townsfolk disapproved of them.
    "You're probably right to let her go through it and get past it," Sheryl murmured. "Best to let children do some of these things instead of forbidding them." Sheryl, who had no children of her own, always seemed to know what other women should do with theirs. "Children are drawn to the forbidden. Anyway, it's probably just a game to her."
    Iris pressed her nose against the raised windowpane, then drew back, afraid someone might look up and see her even though her light was out. Bari had praised her, yet Sheryl was calling her studies only a game.
    "Maybe she'll be chosen," Lilia said in a high, quavering voice.
    "Chosen!" Constance slapped her thigh. "Mother of God, Iris chosen! Wouldn't that give Lincoln something to talk about! We'd certainly seem grand then—why, we'd be invited to every party in town." Constance struggled to control herself. "Chosen! Why, if that happened, she might even become a Linker!" She shrieked with merriment.
    "It's nothing to laugh about," Sheryl said,