Read Online Thing to Love by Geoffrey Household - Free Book Online Page A

she stopped to engage Felicia in voluble conversation. Miro watched the two women approach the house along the broad, grassed avenue between young trees and the new irrigation channels. He always loved to see his wife coming towards him. She moved so lightly, the line of her utterly feminine from pointed breasts to slim legs yet always suggesting some renaissance gallant with feather in cap and his first sword at side. The marked contrast between Felicia and the older woman set off the pair of them.
    â€œFelicia was reading, so I took her to look at the pigs,” Doña Pilar explained when they reached the terrace.
    â€œShe never did show enough interest in politics,” Juan answered with impenetrable courtesy.
    â€œAnd pigs are so important now. Gil says that if every Indian had a pig there would be no more malnutrition.”
    â€œWhat’s the Indian going to feed it on?”
    â€œOh, there is always so much waste in a house!”
    Felicia’s eyes blazed at her father, who was evidently preparing to continue his own entertainment indefinitely. She liked her hostess — more especially since they were the only two women among men of very decided character. Pilar was exactly the right wife for Gil Avellana, and an excellent lazy mother to her children. Since men pretended to admire the quality of cowlike imperturbability, it was all the more unfair to expose her limitations. Felicia suspected that the conventional masculine image of the ideal wife was some sort of obliging sultana in command of a harem. But they could hardly expect this mythical — and surely rather tiresome? — bedfellow to have active intelligence as well.
    Miro quietly and efficiently drew his father-in-law’s fire.
    â€œIt is a pity,” he said, “that pigs taste of bananas on the coast and nothing at all in the highlands. A smokehouse in every village might help.”
    â€œNo fuel, my son, unless we surpass the wildest triumphs of Vidalismo and lay pipelines for the curing of Prague hams.”
    â€œI think Gil would prefer to use the sun,” said Doña Pilar with dignity.
    And a very sensible remark, too, Felicia thought. Pilar did occasionally hit the nail on the head with bland unconsciousness. It was a pity that Gil, alone among his principal supporters, could count on such solidity at home.
    When at last the four horsemen rode up to the terrace out of the dusk, dressed much as the companions of Bolívar but with the reserve of men compelled in spite of themselves to found their statecraft upon statistics instead of liberty and lances, she felt again that all except Gil were somehow incomplete. That dark, squat Morote — nobody had ever seen his wife. As likely as not she could only read and write with difficulty. And Carrillo’s Julia, always busy with the university’s rights-of-women or Pan-American committees, had the unfortunate gift of tiring — not boring, just physically tiring — anyone of either sex who talked to her for more than half an hour.
    Valdés, unmarried, was at any rate socially easy. He disguised his fierce, celibate idealism by affecting an air of irresponsibility which had in his early youth been real. She had a feeling that having sown his wild oats, he should have entered the Church. Under cover of the exquisite manners of a fashionable priest, he could and would have been savagely fanatical.
    Pedro Valdés picked up the guitar which lay on a huge table at one end of the terrace among the hats and magazines and riding switches, and strummed halfheartedly.
    â€œI could play anything when I was twenty,” he said.
    â€œYou thought you could,” Felicia answered.
    â€œAnyway you used to hang out of your window and listen.”
    â€œOnly because Papá told me I was too young. Did he play under your window too, Pilar?”
    â€œYes. It was so beautiful.”
    â€œHe had a regular round like an organ-grinder,” Juan