"Stewart, Mary - Thorny Hold" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mary Stewart - Thorny Hold)

My father sounded amused.

"That's hardly something you can expect me to condemn."

She laughed.

"I'm sorry, I put it badly. But you know what I mean.

One hears so much about religious teaching being emphasised at the
expense of other subjects, especially sciences, and I think that's
where Jilly's interests will lie. She's quick, and she's got a good
brain. She needs good teaching and hard work and competition. I
should know. That's the part of her that's like me. "
Her voice grew fainter as she turned away from the window. I heard
him murmur something in reply, and then a snatch or two that, craning
from my window, I just managed to catch. Something from my father
about "the county school" and "only two stations down the line" , and
an emphatic speech from my mother which I could not hear, but which I
had heard so often that I could supply every word. Her daughter to go
to school with the village children?

Bad enough that she had to attend the primary, but to go to the local
county school till she was seventeen or eighteen, to end up with all
the wrong friends, and an accent like the miners' children? Never!

It was the protest of a lonely woman sealed tightly in her own narrow
social sphere, an attitude which for those days was not outrageous, and
was indeed common enough, fostered in my mother's case by the isolated
Colonial upbringing with its dreams of 'home' still coloured by the
standards of Victoria. It was also, as I knew even then, the voice of
frustrated ambition. My mother's daughter (never my father's on these
occasions) must have the chances which had been withheld from her own
generation; her daughter must have independence, the freedom, that only
education could give her, to choose her own line of life. The higher
education, at that; a University degree, and a good one. A First? Why
not? Of that, and how much more, would her daughter be capable.

And so on. I could guess at it all, and with it my father's invariable
protest (he was as Victorian in his way as she) that a daughter, a
beautiful daughter, would surely get married, and find in that way the
greatest happiness, the only happiness and true fulfilment a woman
could know.

IfJilly had been a boy, then a public school and University by all
means, but for a daughter, surely quite unnecessary?

My mother was back at the window again, her voice clear and sharp.

Too sharp. This was no longer theory; the hope was about to be