So Big by Edna Ferber (read books for money .txt) 📕

oak branch outside the window on a patch of sunlight against the blackboard behind her.

During the early spring Dirk and Selina talked things over again, seated before their own fireplace in the High Prairie farmhouse. Selina had had that fireplace built five years before and her love of it amounted to fire-worship. She had it lighted always on winter evenings and in the spring when the nights were sharp. In Dirk’s absence she would sit before it at night long after the rest of the weary household had gone to bed. Old Pom, the mongrel, lay stretched at her feet enjoying such luxury in old age as he had never dreamed of in his bastard youth. High Prairie, driving by from some rare social gathering or making a late trip to market as they sometimes were forced to do, saw the rosy flicker of Mrs. DeJong’s fire dancing on the wall and warmed themselves by it even while they resented it.

“A good heater in there and yet anyway she’s got to have a fire going in a grate. Always she does something funny like that. I should think she’d be lonesome sitting there like that with her dog only.”

They never knew how many guests Selina entertained there before her fire those winter evenings⁠—old friends and new. Sobig was there, the plump earth-grimed baby who rolled and tumbled in the fields while his young mother wiped the sweat from her face to look at him with fond eyes. Dirk DeJong of ten years hence was there. Simeon Peake, dapper, soft-spoken, ironic, in his shiny boots and his hat always a little on one side. Pervus DeJong, a blue-shirted giant with strong tender hands and little fine golden hairs on the backs of them. Fanny Davenport, the actress-idol of her girlhood came back to her, smiling, bowing; and the gorgeous spangled creatures in the tights and bodices of the old Extravaganzas. In strange contrast to these was the patient, tireless figure of Maartje Pool standing in the doorway of Roelf’s little shed, her arms tucked in her apron for warmth. “You make fun, huh?” she said, wistfully, “you and Roelf. You make fun.” And Roelf, the dark vivid boy, misunderstood. Roelf, the genius. He was always one of the company.

Oh, Selina DeJong never was lonely on these winter evenings before her fire.

She and Dirk sat there one fine sharp evening in early April. It was Saturday. Of late Dirk had not always come to the farm for the weekend. Eugene and Paula Arnold had been home for the Easter holidays. Julie Arnold had invited Dirk to the gay parties at the Prairie Avenue house. He had even spent two entire weekends there. After the brocaded luxury of the Prairie Avenue house his farm bedroom seemed almost startlingly stark and bare. Selina frankly enjoyed Dirk’s somewhat fragmentary accounts of these visits; extracted from them as much vicarious pleasure as he had had in the reality⁠—more, probably.

“Now tell me what you had to eat,” she would say, sociably, like a child. “What did you have for dinner, for example? Was it grand? Julie tells me they have a butler now. Well! I can’t wait till I hear Aug Hempel on the subject.”

He would tell her of the grandeurs of the Arnold ménage. She would interrupt and exclaim: “Mayonnaise! On fruit! Oh, I don’t believe I’d like that. You did! Well, I’ll have it for you next week when you come home. I’ll get the recipe from Julie.”

He didn’t think he’d be home next week. One of the fellows he’d met at the Arnolds’ had invited him to their place out north, on the lake. He had a boat.

“That’ll be lovely!” Selina exclaimed, after an almost unnoticeable moment of silence⁠—silence with panic in it. “I’ll try not to fuss and be worried like an old hen every minute of the time I think you’re on the water.⁠ ⁠… Now do go on, Sobig. First fruit with mayonnaise, h’m? What kind of soup?”

He was not a naturally talkative person. There was nothing surly about his silence. It was a taciturn streak inherited from his Dutch ancestry. This time, though, he was more voluble than usual. “Paula⁠ ⁠…” came again and again into his conversation. “Paula⁠ ⁠… Paula⁠ ⁠…” and again “… Paula.” He did not seem conscious of the repetition, but Selina’s quick ear caught it.

“I haven’t seen her,” Selina said, “since she went away to school the first year. She must be⁠—let’s see⁠—she’s a year older than you are. She’s nineteen going on twenty. Last time I saw her I thought she was a dark scrawny little thing. Too bad she didn’t inherit Julie’s lovely gold colouring and good looks, instead of Eugene, who doesn’t need ’em.”

“She isn’t!” said Dirk, hotly. “She’s dark and slim and sort of⁠—uh⁠—sensuous”⁠—Selina started visibly, and raised her hand quickly to her mouth to hide a smile⁠—“like Cleopatra. Her eyes are big and kind of slanting⁠—not squinty I don’t mean, but slanting up a little at the corners. Cut out, kind of, so that they look bigger than most people’s.”

“My eyes used to be considered rather fine,” said Selina, mischievously; but he did not hear.

“She makes all the other girls look sort of blowzy.” He was silent a moment. Selina was silent, too, and it was not a happy silence. Dirk spoke again, suddenly, as though continuing aloud a train of thought, “⁠—all but her hands.”

Selina made her voice sound natural, not sharply inquisitive. “What’s the matter with her hands, Dirk?”

He pondered a moment, his brows knitted. At last, slowly, “Well, I don’t know. They’re brown, and awfully thin and sort of⁠—grabby. I mean it makes me nervous to watch them. And when the rest of her is cool they’re hot when you touch them.”

He looked at his mother’s hands that were busy with some sewing. The stuff on which she was working was a bit of satin ribbon; part of a hood intended to grace the head of Geertje Pool Vander Sijde’s second baby. She