【英文原著类】One Basket(一个篮子).pdf

ONE BASKET
ONE BASKET
THIRTY-ONE SHORT STORIES
EDNA FERBER
1
ONE BASKET
The Woman Who Tried to Be Good
[1913]
Before she tried to be a good woman she had been a very bad
woman--so bad that she could trail her wonderful apparel up and down
Main Street, from the Elm Tree Bakery to the railroad tracks, without once
having a man doff his hat to her or a woman bow. You passed her on the
street with a surreptitious glance, though she was well worth looking at--
in her furs and laces and plumes. She had the only full-length mink coat
in our town, and Ganz's shoe store sent to Chicago for her shoes. Hers
were the miraculously small feet you frequently see in stout women.
Usually she walked alone; but on rare occasions, especially round
Christmastime, she might have been seen panied by some silent,
dull-eyed, stupid-looking girl, who would follow her dumbly in and out of
stores, stopping now and then to admire a b or a chain set with
flashy imitation stones--or, queerly enough, a doll with yellow hair and
blue eyes and very pink cheeks. But, alone or pany, her
appearance in the stores of our town was the signal for a sudden jump in
the cost of living. The storekeepers mulcted her; and she knew it and paid
in silence, for she was of the class that has no redress. She owned the
House with the Closed Shutters, near the freight depot--did Blanche
Devine.
In a larger town than ours she would have passed unnoticed. She did
not look like a bad woman. Of course she used too much make-up, and
as she passed you caught the oversweet breath of a certain heavy scent.
Then, too, her diamond eardrops would have made any woman's features
look hard; but her plump face, in spite of its heaviness, wore an expression
of good-humored intelligence, and her eyeglasses gave her somehow a
look of respectability. We do not associate vice with eyeglasses. So in
a large city she would have passed for a well-dressed, prosperous,
comfortable wife and mother who