李声 |
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 发表: 2004-09-23 11:24:40 人气:467  
"Will you buy my hair?" asked Della.
"I buy hair." said Madame."Take yer hat off and let's have a sight at the looks of it."
Down rippled the brown cascade.
"Twenty dollars,"said Madame,lifting the mass with a practiced hand.
"Give it to me quick."said Della.
Oh,and the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings.Forget the hashed metaphor.She was ransack ing the stores for Jim's present.
She found it at last.It surely had been made for Jim and no one else.There was no otherlike it in any of the stores,and she had turned all of them inside out.It was a platinum fob chain simple and chaste in design,properly proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by meretricious ornamentation-as all good things should do.It was even worthy of The Watch.As soon as she waw it she knew that it must be Jim's.It was like him.Quietness and value-the decription applied to both.
Twenty-one dollars they took from her for it,and she hurried home with the eighty-seven cents.With that chain on his watch Jim might be properly anxious about the time in any company.Grand as the watch was,he sometimes looked at it on the sly on account of the old leather strap that he used in place of a chain.
When Della reached home her intoxication gave way a little to prudence and reason.She got out her curling irons and lighted the gas and went to work repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love.Which is always a tremeddous task,dear friends-a mammoth task.
Within forty minutes her head was coverded with tiny,close-lying curls that made her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy.She looked at her reflection in the mirror long,carefully,and critically.
"If Jim doesn't kill me," She said to herself,"before he takes a second look at me,he'll say look like a Coney Island chorus girl.But what could I do-oh!What could I do with a dollar and eighty-seven cents?"
At seven o'clock the coffee was made and the frying pan was on the back of the stove hot and ready to cook the chops.
Jim was never lates.Della doubled the fob chain in her hand and sat on the corner of the stair away down on the first flight;and she turned white for just a moment.She had a habit of saying little silent prayers about the simplest everyday things,and now she whispered,"please,God,make him think I am still pretty."
The door opened and Jim stepped in and closed it.He looked thin and very serious.Poor fellow,he was only twenty-two-and to be burdened with a family!He needed a new overcoat and he was without gloves.
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