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показался мне очень осторожным и нерешительным человеком. 18. Мне кажется, он настоящий знаток живописи.

TEXT EIGHT THE APPLE-TREE

By John Galsworthy

(Extract)

John Galsworthy (1867—1933), a prominent English novelist, playwright and short-story writer, came from an upper middle-class family. He was edu-

cated at Harrow and Oxford and was called to the Bar. His first novel (From the Four Winds) was published in 1897, but it was The Man of Property that

won him fame. Among his numerous novels The Forsyte Saga and A Modern Comedy are the most prominent. They give a truthful picture of English

bourgeois society at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centu ries. The Apple-Tree (1917) is one of the most popular long short stories written by John Galsworthy.

On the first of May, after their last year together at.college, Frank Ashurst and his friend Robert Garton were on a tramp. They had

walked that day from Brent, intending to make Chagford 1 but Ashurst's football knee 2 had given out, and according to their map they

had still some seven miles to go. They were sitting on a bank beside the road, where a track crossed alongside a wood, resting the

knee and talking of the universe, as young men will. Both were over six feet, and thin as rails,3 Ashurst pale, idealistic, full of absence;

Garton queer, round-the-corner,4 knotted, curly, like some primeval beast. Both had a literary bent; neither wore a hat. Ashurst's hair

was smooth, pale, wavy; and had a way of rising on either side of his brow, as if always being flung back; Garton's was a kind of dark

un- fathomed mop. They had not met a soul for miles.

"My dear fellow," Garton was saying, "pity's only an effect of self-consciousness; it's a disease of the last five thousand years. The

world was happier without."

Ashurst did not answer; he had plucked a blue floweret, and was twiddling it against the sky. A cuckoo began calling from a thorn

tree. The sky, the flowers, the songs of birds! Robert was talking through his h a t . 5 And he said:

"Wel , let's go on, and find some farm where we can put up." In uttering those words he was conscious of a girl coming

down from the common just above them. She was outlined against the sky, carrying a basket, and you could see that sky

through the crook of her arm. And Ashurst, who saw beauty without wondering how it could advantage him, thought:

"How pretty!" The wind, blowing her dark frieze skirt against her legs, lifted her battered peacock tam-o'-shanter; her

greyish blouse was worn and old, her shoes were split, her little hands rough and red, her neck browned. Her dark hair waved untidy

across her broad forehead, her face was short, her upper lip short, showing a glint of teeth, her brows were straight and dark, her

lashes long and dark, her nose straight; but her grey eyes were the wonder — dewy as if opened for the first time that day. She looked

at Ashurst — perhaps he struck her as strange, limping along without a hat, with his large eyes on her, and his hair flung back. He