"Date of publication 2083 AD" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morrison William)

"It's a crazy world," thought Carrie wisely. "You never know what sort of
lunatic you'll run into next." And then she put it out of her mind and turned to
a more important problem. What could she have for dinner that night that would
please Bill and not make him say, "You know I never eat spinach,"— or broccoli
or her new sauce or whatever it was he was never eating that week?
All the same it didn't surprise her greatly when Bill came home the day after
and said, "You'll never guess what happened at the office."
"Somebody else went crazy."
"Nobody went crazy. We all slept."
"What?"
"We all slept. At ten o'clock Mr. Elvergard came in and said, 'All right, boys
and girls, we've been working too hard, all of us. Let's take a nice long rest
today, shall we? Put your pretty little heads on your pretty little desks. One,
two, three, snooze!' "
"You're joking!"
"Cross my heart and hope to die. We all fell asleep and we stayed asleep till
four-thirty and then he woke us up and sent us home early so we wouldn't get
caught in the worst of the subway rush."
Carrie looked at him and said absolutely nothing. What had happened at school
had been bad enough. But this was absolutely incredible. There were times when
Bill was a great kidder and she wasn't sure whether to take him seriously or
not. This appeared to be one of the times when he was not to be taken seriously.
Even if there were the faintest chance that he was telling the truth she thought
it best not to encourage him by pretending to believe a story like that.
It was harder, however, to take things as a joke when something just as silly
happened to her. In this case she could remember almost every word exactly,
without having the slightest idea of what had caused the whole conversation to
take so unexpected a turn.
The usual group was in for bridge. They had been playing for about half an
hour—that skinny Mrs. Cayley munching away daintily at all the richest cakes as
if she thought they might put some decent flesh on her, Mrs. Munro making a
great fuss about the fact that the special candies she was eating were
non-nutritive and therefore non-fattening, the others just eating normally and
too much as the mood struck them. Mrs. Munro was dummy, and by some shrewdly
ill-timed advice managed to make her partner go down three.
Her partner was furious but Mrs. Munro just giggled. "You'll never guess whom I
saw with somebody else's wife," she said in her loud whisper.
"Really?" said Mrs. Cayley. "Janet's husband?"
"Not in a million years. It was my husband!"
Carrie sat up as if she had received an electric shock. This was a new sort of
gossip.
"Well, at least your Bruce has good taste in women," said Mrs. Cayley
generously. "Now, when my husband steps out—well, really, I'm ashamed of him. Of
course, I suppose he does the best he can, poor dear."
That was the way it went the rest of that afternoon. When Carrie thought back to
it later she shuddered. She had never before taken part in such a gossip session
and she hoped that she never, would again. Each of them had chatted, not about
some absent individual but about herself and her own relations. What skeletons
had popped out of the closets!
It was the morning after that Barbara's letter came. "We had the funniest