【英文原著类】The Early Short Fiction Part Two #(早斯短篇小说(第二部)).pdf

A Ten-Part Collection Part Two
A Ten-Part Collection
Part Two
Edith Wharton
1
A Ten-Part Collection Part Two
AFTERWARD January 1910
I
"Oh, there IS one, of course, but you'll never know it."
The assertion, laughingly flung out six months earlier in a bright June
garden, came back to Mary Boyne with a sharp perception of its latent
significance as she stood, in the December dusk, waiting for the lamps to
be brought into the library.
The words had been spoken by their friend Alida Stair, as they sat at
tea on her lawn at Pangbourne, in reference to the very house of which the
library in question was the central, the pivotal "feature." Mary Boyne and
her husband, in quest of a country place in one of the southern or
southwestern counties, had, on their arrival in England, carried their
problem straight to Alida Stair, who had essfully solved it in her own
case; but it was not until they had rejected, almost capriciously, several
practical and judicious suggestions that she threw it out: "Well, there's
Lyng, in Dorsetshire. It belongs to Hugo's cousins, and you can get it for a
song."
The reasons she gave for its being obtainable on these terms--its
remoteness from a station, its lack of electric light, hot-water pipes, and
other vulgar necessities--were exactly those pleading in its favor with two
romantic Americans perversely in search of the economic drawbacks
which were associated, in their tradition, with unusual architectural
felicities.
"I should never believe I was living in an old house unless I was
thoroughly fortable," Ned Boyne, the more extravagant of the two,
had jocosely insisted; "the least hint of 'convenience' would make me
think it had been bought out of an exhibition, with the pieces numbered,
and set up again." And they had proceeded to enumerate, with humorous
precision, their various suspicions and exactions, refusing to believe that
the house their cousin mended was REALLY Tudor till they learned
it h