英文解釈教室の出典を探る(92)

Chapter 15 挿入の諸形式

例題 15.2.2

"He"は主人公Leoの父親。父の趣味のおかげでLeoには莫大な財産が入ることになる。

Chapter One

His talents went into his hobbies, which were book-collecting and gardening; for his career he had accepted a routine occupation and was quite content to be a bank manager in Salisbury. My mother fretted at his lack of enterprise and was a little jealous and impatient of his hobbies, which enclosed him in himself, as hobbies do, and, so she thought, got him nowhere. In this she turned out to be wrong, for he was a collector of taste and foresight, and his books made a sum that astonished us when they were sold; indeed, I owe to them my immunity from the more pressing cares of life. But this was long after; at the time, my mother fortunately never thought of selling his books: she cherished the things he had been fond of, partly from a feeling that she had been unfair to him; and we lived on her money, and the pension from the bank, and the little he had been able to put by.

My mother, though unworldly, was always attracted by the things of the world; she felt that if circumstances had been different, she could have taken her place in it; but thanks to my father’s preferring objects to people, she had very little chance. She liked gossip, she liked social occasions and to be dressed right for them; she was sensitive to public opinion in the village, and an invitation to some function in Salisbury would always set her aflutter. To mix with well-dressed people on some smooth lawn, with the spire of the Cathedral soaring above, to greet and be greeted by them, to exchange items of family news and make timid contributions to political discussions---all this gave her a tremulous pleasure; she felt supported by the presence of acquaintances, she needed a social frame. When the landau arrived (there was a livery stable in the village) she stepped into it with a little air of pride and self-fulfilment very different from her usual diffident and anxious manner. And if she had persuaded my father to go with her, she looked almost triumphant.

出典：L. P. Hartley: The Go-Between (1953)
原仙作『英文標準問題精講』例題49

（備考）

この小説は「20世紀のイギリス文学を代表する傑作」とされていて、あらすじ等は、検索するとすぐにわかりますので、興味のある方はどうぞ。「恋」というタイトルで映画化もされてます。

（参考）（ともに英語版）