Read Online Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende - Free Book Online

law. Social classes have been abolished.”
    â€œWe are speaking of women, old boy, not men. As for the rest, the United States is a country of merchants and pioneers, totally lacking in tradition or a sense of history. Equality does not exist anywhere, not even among animals, and much less in Chile.”
    â€œBut we are foreigners, Jeremy, we speak scarcely a word of Spanish. What do Chilean social classes matter to us? This will never be our country.”
    â€œWe must set a good example. If we British are incapable of keeping our own house in order, what can we expect of others?”
    â€œEliza has grown up in this family. I don’t think that Miss Rose would agree to deprive her simply because she is growing up.”
    And she did not. Rose defied her brother, calling upon a full repertory of ills. First it was stomach upset and then an alarming headache that struck her blind overnight. For several days the entire house was cloaked in silence: drapes were closed, people walked on tiptoe and talked in whispers. Nothing was cooked because the smell of food exacerbated the symptoms. Jeremy Sommers ate at the club and returned home with the worried and timid attitude of someone visiting a hospital. Rose’s peculiar blindness and many ailments, added to the stubborn silence of the household servants, quickly undermined Jeremy’s resolve. As the last straw, Mama Fresia, mysteriously acquainted with the private discussions between brother and sister, became a formidable ally of her patrona . Jeremy Sommers thought of himself as a civilized and pragmatic man, invulnerable to intimidation by a superstitious witch like Mama Fresia, but when the Indian lighted black candles and fanned smoke from burning sage everywhere, under the pretext of driving off mosquitoes, he closed himself in the library, wavering between fear and fury. At night he could hear the swish of her bare feet outside his door, her low voice quietly singing psalms and curses. The Wednesday he found a dead lizard in his bottle of brandy he decided to act once and for all. For the first time ever, he knocked at his sister’s door and was admitted into that sanctuary of feminine mysteries he preferred to know nothing of, just as alien to him as the sewing room, the kitchen, the laundry, and the dark corners of the attic where the maidservants lived, to say nothing of Mama Fresia’s dark domain at the rear of the patio: he lived his world in the drawing rooms, the library with its waxed mahogany shelves and his collection of engravings of the hunt, the billiards room with its ornately carved table, his bedroom furnished in Spartan simplicity, and a small dressing room with Italian tile where someday he planned to install a modern toilet like those he had seen in catalogues from New York, because he had read that the system of chamber pots and of collecting human excrement in buckets to use as fertilizer was a breeding ground for epidemics. He had to wait for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, as he uneasily breathed in the combined scents of medicines and a persistent tone of vanilla. Rose was barely visible, wan and suffering, flat on her back in the bed, with no pillow, her arms folded across her breast as if practicing for her death. Beside her, Eliza was wringing a cloth dipped in a brew of green tea to place over Rose’s eyes.
    â€œLeave us, child,” said Jeremy Sommers, taking a chair beside the bed.
    Eliza bobbed her head and left, but she knew every last crack and chink of the house, and with her ear pressed to the thin dividing wall she could hear the conversation that later she repeated to Mama Fresia and wrote down in her diary.
    â€œVery well, Rose. We cannot continue this warfare. Let us reach an accord. What is it you want?” asked Jeremy, conquered before he began.
    â€œNothing, Jeremy,” Rose sighed in a barely audible voice.
    â€œThey will never accept Eliza in Madame Colbert’s academy. Only