Gender Readings. Top Ten. Ренц Т.Г - 63 стр.

  7          W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
             HOME

      The farm lay in a small valley among the Somersetshire hills, an
old-fashioned stone house surrounded by barns and pens and out-
houses. Over the doorway the date when it was built had been carved
in the elegant figures of the period, 1673, and the house, grey and
weather-beaten, looked as much a part of the landscape as the trees
that surrounded it. An avenue of splendid elms led from the road to
the neat garden. The people who lived here were unexcitable, strong
and modest as the house; their only boast was that ever since it was
built they had been born and died in it: from father to son in one
unbroken line. For three hundred years they had farmed the sur-
rounding land. George Meadows was now a man of fifty, and his wife
was a year or two younger. They were both fine, honest people in the
prime of life; and their children, two sons and three girls were
handsome and strong. I have never seen a more united household.
They were merry, industrious and kindly. Their life had a complete-
ness that gave it a beauty as definite as that of a symphony of Beethoven’s
or a picture by Titian. They were happy and they deserved their
happiness. But the master of the house was not George Meadows (not
by a long chalk, they said in the village); it was his mother. She was
twice the man her son was, they said. She was a woman of seventy,
tall, upright and dignified with grey hair, and though her face was
much wrinkled, her eyes were bright and shrewd. Her word was law
in the house and on the farm; but she had humor, and if her rule was
despotic it was also kindly. People laughed at her jokes and repeated
them. She was a good business woman. She combined in a rare degree
good will with a sense of the ridiculous. She was a character. One day
Mrs. George stopped me on my way home. She was really exited. (Her
mother-in-law was the only “Mrs. Meadows” we knew; George’s wife
was only known as “Mrs. George”).
      “Who ever do you think is coming here today?” she asked me.
“Uncle George Meadows. You know, he was in China.”
      “Why, I thought he was dead.”
      “We all thought he was dead.”


                                  – 63 –