Angel Read Online Free Page B

wondering whether they should go to Folkestone or to the Lake District for their honeymoons. To be married women as soon as possible seemed the sum of their ambition, to get what they wanted from life very early in it and then to ask nothing more, to remain in that state for the rest of their days.
    â€œSo exciting! Don’t you think so, Angel?” Beattie asked slyly.
    â€œWhat is exciting?”
    â€œWhy, getting married, of course.”
    â€œIt depends who to,” said Angel.
    â€œYou are always in trouble for ending sentences with prepositions,” Beattie said.
    â€œI shall begin and end my sentences as I please.” She had stopped propitiating them. “And how can you or anyone be excited about getting married to someone you can’t even give a name to?”
    â€œDon’t worry!” Ellie said crossly. “I don’t suppose we shall have to wait long.” To separate themselves from Angel, she and Beattie linked arms, which was against the school rules.
    â€œIf you fall in love,” said Angel, “what do weddings matter? What have all these clothes and cakes and presents to do with that?”
    She had begun this argument to belittle their enthusiasm and to revenge herself, but she was warming to it for its own sake. Until now she had thought of love with bleak distaste. She wanted to dominate the world, not one person.
    â€œOh, you’re very clever,” said Ellie. She almost gasped the words: her fury made her breathless. She pushed through the school gate in front of Angel. Her head was high and the colour bright in her cheeks. She had the contemptuous look Angel was often to meet in women, who, feeling their calm threatened by the unconventional, from fear of inadequacy fall back on rage; and Ellie’s anger came suddenly in a great gust, so that she longed to spin round and hit Angel’s pale face. “You would,” she cried. “Of course, you would think such things. Who would expect you to believe in Holy Matrimony? Why, it would be very strange if you did.”
    She hurried on towards the school building and Beattie, looking rather frightened, hurried after her.
    Angel could see Gwen and Polly scurrying ahead, too; like mice they darted into the cloakroom when they noticed her. She remembered the expression on their mother’s face when she had come to the window that morning, and she felt menaced and bewildered. She pondered Ellie’s words, turning them over and over in her mind, walking towards the cloakroom slowly, although the other girls had gone indoors. She was the last, and a bell began to ring for prayers.
    The day went sluggishly by. An oil-stove was lit in the classroom, but the girls who sat by the window still shivered, chafing their chilblains. They stayed in their desks as one dull lesson followed another, except that sometimes they were told to stand and do a few feeble exercises, clapping their hands above their heads and swinging their arms. Hour after hour, they were made to learn lessons by heart, French vocabularies, psalms, history dates and the names of rivers, until their heads were so tightly crammed with facts that thoughts had no room to move in them. When the lists were learned they droned them in unison. For their drawing-lesson some tattered prints were handed round for them to copy. There were never any new ones and Angel had drawn the same windmill a dozen times. In needlework, they made chain-stitch patterns on pieces of unbleached linen which smelt of glue.
    At midday, some of the girls remained. They stayed in the classroom and unpacked their sandwiches. No one spoke to Angel, who sat at her desk, unwrapped her lunch and ate it hungrily, staring out of the window.
    By afternoon, a white fog began to blot out the great layered branches of the cedar trees; then the sky discoloured; by four o’clock it was the colour of snuff. The day had seemed endless.
    Angel went dreamily home. Gwen and Polly