The Reading Lessons Read Online Free

do then?” Hadley asked, praying she wouldn’t send him away.
    “Well,” said Lucinda, “if you’ll promise to stop looking at me like you’re about to pee your britches, I might just let you join my club.”
    “Club?” Hadley repeated with an unhappy shudder, for he did not know how to play bridge, or quilt, or dance cotillions, and these were the only clubs he could think of.
    “It’s a secret club. That means you can’t tell anyone about it. Understand?”
    “Does it have a name?”
    “Of course, silly boy. Readers of Violent Indefensible Lust and Evil. ”
    “That’s too long to remember,” Hadley said.
    “ V.I.L.E . for short, you dummy. Anyway, it’s not like we’re going to have stationary. Now go and prize up that floorboard over by the window that has my boot on top of it.”
    Under the floorboard was a little cranny the size of two books. Hadley was five minutes wiggling them out. 
    “Finally,” Lucinda said, snatching the books from his fingers. “I didn’t think I was going get my hands on these until my leg improved.” She held up one of the books. “Ever read this?” 
    Curly-Q letters spelled out the words Anna Karenina .
    Lucinda laughed. “Of course you haven’t. No decent woman would let her son look at such a thing.”
    “Why not?” Hadley asked, scratching at the curls his mama had spit down. 
    “Read this part here.” Lucinda instructed. She tapped one of the pages.
    Hadley read in a careful way, trying his best to sound schooled. Having nothing but the Bible to read, he was better with impenitent or Amalekite or collop than he was with non-Christian words.
    And as the murderer, with fury, and, as it were, with passion, falls on the body, and drags it, and hacks at it—so he covered her face and shoulders with kisses.
    “Filthy, isn’t it?” Lucinda sniggered.
    “Is it?”
    “Yes, you little nimrod. Anna Karenina is a married woman, and she isn’t married to the man who is murdering her with kisses. This is disgraceful, Hadley.”
    “Should I put it back?”
    “Not on your life. We’re going to read every unsavory word of it, and there’s going to be a test, too.”
    “But I already told you, I read just fine.”
    Lucinda, perhaps the world’s most accomplished sigher, sighed expertly. “Looks like I’ll have to teach you a thing or two. We’re going to read until Daddy fetches you back to work, then I’m going to let you borrow a book . The Age of Innocence . I want you to search through it tonight and find me the naughtiest passage you can come up with. Now hand me Through the Looking Glass over there.”
    Lucinda put Anna Karenina inside a book called Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There . Then she fit the little monocle she fancied into position over her right eye and began to read to Hadley. Mostly it seemed boring, but he enjoyed the way she said the words as if she was telling him a secret. 
    When it was time to go, she instructed him to hide The Age of Innocence down the front of his trousers until he could put it somewhere safe. This turned out to be an unnecessary and highly awkward precaution since Hadley’s mama didn’t have any idea that the book was evil. When she caught him looking at it under the covers, she said, “It was nice of Miss Lucinda to let you borrow a book.” 
    Mama thought it impolite to turn down reading lessons from a Browning, even if you were already a reader. She was pleased as a tick on a fat man that Hadley was going to have a real book to look at. 
    The way she smiled at The Age of Innocence tied his guts in a hundred and one knots of guilt, but the story seemed harmless enough. It was two in the morning before Hadley stumbled on something lurid. 
    The next afternoon he read his naughty passage to Lucinda.
    He sat bowed over, his head between his hands, staring at the hearth-rug, and at the tip of the satin shoe that showed under her dress. Suddenly he knelt down and kissed the