【英文原著类】The Confession(忏悔).pdf

The Confession
The Confession
by Mary Roberts Rinehart
1
The Confession
I
I am not a susceptible woman. I am objective rather than subjective,
and a fairly full experience of life has taught me that most of my
impressions are from within out rather than the other way about. For
instance, obsession at one time a few years ago of a shadowy figure on my
right, just beyond the field of vision, was later exposed as the result of a
defect in my glasses. In the same way Maggie, my old servant, was
during one entire summer haunted by church-bells and considered it a
personal summons to eternity until it was shown to be in her inner ear.
Yet the Benton house undeniably made me fortable. Perhaps it
was because it had remained unchanged for so long. The old horsehair
chairs, with their shiny mahogany frames, showed by the slightly worn
places in the carpet before them that they had not deviated an inch from
their position for many years. The carpets - carpets that reached to the
very baseboards and gave under one's feet with the yielding of heavy
padding beneath - were bright under beds and wardrobes, while in the
centers of the rooms they had faded into the softness of old tapestry.
Maggie, I remember, on our arrival moved a chair from the wall in the
library, and immediately put it back again, with a glance to see if I had
observed her.
"It's nice and clean, Miss Agnes," she said. "A - I kind of feel that a
little dirt would make it more homelike."
"I'm sure I don't see why," I replied, rather sharply, "I've lived in a
tolerably clean house most of my life."
Maggie, however, was digging a heel into the padded carpet. She had
chosen a sunny place for the experiment, and a small cloud of dust rose
like smoke.
"Germs!" she said. "Just what I expected. We'd better bring the
vacuum cleaner out from the city, Miss Agnes. Them carpets haven't
been lifted for years."
But I paid little attention to her. To Maggie any particle of matter no