Gender Readings. Top Ten. Ренц Т.Г - 33 стр.

charmed, she could hardly believe in Gwen’s friendly indifference to
him, notwithstanding he was a teacher at the same grammar school
as Gwen, who therefore, saw him every day.
      Every time he met them he kissed Gwen on the cheek.
      “You seem to be on very good terms with him,” Trudy said.
      “Oh. Richard’s an old friend. I’ve known him for years.”
      The second week, Gwen went off on various expeditions of her
own and left them together.
      “This is quite a connoisseur’s place,” Richard informed Trudy,
and he pointed out why, and in what choice way, it was so, and
Trudy, charmed, saw in the peeling pastel stucco of the little town,
the unnecessary floral balconies, the bulbous Slovene spires, some-
thing special after all. She felt she saw, through his eyes, a precious
rightness in the women with their grey skirts and well-filled blouses
who trod beside their husbands and their clean children.
      “Are they all Austrians?” Trudy asked.
      “No, some of them are German and French. But this place
attracts the same type.”
      Richard’s eyes rested with appreciation on the young noisy campers
whose tents were pitched in the lake-side field. The campers were
long-limbed and animal, brightly and briefly dressed. They romped
like galvanized goats, yet looked surprisingly virtuous.
      “What are they saying to each other?” She enquired of Richard
when a group of them passed by, shouting some words and laughing
at each other through glistening red li ps and very white teeth.
      “They are talking about their fast M.G. racing cars.”
      “Oh, have they got racing cars?”
      “No, the racing cars they are talking about don’t exist. Some-
times they talk about their film contracts which don’t exist. That’s
why they laugh.”
      “Not much of a sense of humour, have they?”
      “They are of mixed nationalities, so they have to limit their
humour to jokes which everyone can understand, and so they talk
about racing cars which aren’t there.”
      Trudy giggled a little, to show willing. Richard told her he was
thirty-five, which she thought feasible. She volunteered that she was not
quite twenty-two. Whereupon Richard looked at her and looked away,
and looked again and took her hand. For, as he told Gwen afterwards,
this remarkable statement was almost an invitation to a love affair.

                                 – 33 –