The Precious One Read Online Free

you won’t,” she said.
    “You bet I won’t!”
    It took every bit of self-restraint I had not to click my heels together and salute.
    ONE WEEK LATER CAME the hair-raising hand-raising episode.
    It was English literature. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice . I had been pleasantly surprised to find that we were studying a book I had already read, since my literary education was, I have to admit, a little spotty. My father was a scientist, a chaired professor of genetic science at an Ivy League university, even though he didn’t really teach anymore. He was also a lifelong history and philosophy buff and a fluent speaker of both French and Italian. The man was shockingly educated. The truth is, though, that he had no use for fiction and even less for poetry, never had, not even as a child. He explained this by saying, “One who truly sees, sees the intricacies and fascinations of facts can hardly be expected to be quite so intrigued by nonfacts, can one?,” which is a pretty convincing argument, I think. But me? I guess I had an inferior grasp of facts. I loved stories.
    Early on, my mother taught my English classes, but after I was about eight or nine, she sort of drifted from the picture, gradually pulled back into her world of glass. In what I liked to think of as a giant demonstration of faith in me, my father let me continue on my own, with the single caveat that I read nothing beyond the end of the nineteenth century, since all literature written after that was, by his estimation, trash. I wasn’t so sure about this. It seemed to defy the law of probability that in over one hundred years, no one had written a single item worth reading, not even by accident .
    But I knew the deeper reason for the caveat, the one that was behind every decision he made, and that was that he wanted to keep me safe and uncorrupted forever, keep me from turning out like the Others, the Earlier Ones, because he loved me more than anyone in the world. He never said this, not in so many words, but he didn’t have to. I knew. So I honored the caveat, would have even if I’d had the choice not to (I had no way of buying books for myself after all), but sometimes, in the middle of reading John Donne or Shakespeare or the Russians or the Brontës, all that passion, drinking, madness, murder, and generally poor decision making, I would think, If you only knew, you’d make me stop reading completely! , and loyal daughter though I was, no way in the world was I telling him.
    But getting back to the hand-raising.
    My English teacher, Mr. Insley, was restless, a strider, boldly cutting a path around the perimeters of the rectangular room so that focusing on him usually meant swiveling your neck around until it cricked, something that most of the students didn’t bother to do. Narrow shouldered and slim in his tweed jacket, with fine, pale brown, backswept hair, he looked like John Keats, only taller and less tubercular and not forever leaning his chin on his hand as though his neck were too flimsy to hold up his head on its own. On the contrary, Mr. Insley seemed to bristle with energy. When he posed a particularly important question to the class, he would wave one long, skinny finger in the air and stare at us with what could only be called fervor.
    I would not have thought that someone could get so impassioned about Pride and Prejudice . Wuthering Heights , yes, Tess of the d’Urbervilles , sure, but Pride and Prejudice , well, no, not necessarily. I adore Austen. Adore! Who could read P and P without wanting to be Elizabeth Bennet, with her fine eyes and sharp wit? Who wouldn’t want to take an elegant turn around a drawing room or sit with a straight back at a writing desk, composing a letter? But to cant forward, the way Mr. Insley was doing, flushed and burning eyed, to ask the quaking-voiced question“In your opinion, did Elizabeth Bennet marry Darcy for his money?,” seemed a little much, a little out of place. Out of place but—I