词汇：woman

n. 女性；妇女；成年女子

相关场景

“Nothing, Betsey,” Clara said. “Just a crazy woman talking to herself.” “Martin acts like he’s got a stomach-ache,” Betsey complained. “You didn’t have to look so mean at him, Ma.” Clara turned for a moment. “I won’t have him spitting out food,” she said. “The reason men are awful is because some woman has spoiled them. Martin’s going to learn manners if he learns nothing else.” “I don’t think men are awful,” Betsey said. “Dish ain’t.” “Let me be, Betsey,” Clara said. “Put Martin to bed.” She opened the letter—just a few words in a scrawling hand: Dear Clara—I would be obliged if you’d look after Lorie. I fear she’ll take this hard.I’m down to one leg now and this life is fading fast, so I can’t say more. Good luck to you and your gals, I hope you do well with the horses.Gus Clara went out on her porch and sat, twisting her hands, for an hour. She could see that the men were below, still smoking, but they were silent. It’s too much death, she thought. Why does it keep coming to me?>>完整场景

After supper the men went out of the house to smoke, all glad to escape the company of the silent woman. Even Betsey and Sally, accustomed to chattering through supper, competing for the men’s attention, were subdued by their mother’s silence, and merely attended to serving.>>完整场景

Then he saw that Dish was looking beyond him. He turned and saw that the blond woman had come out of the house.>>完整场景

“Gus was crazy and you’re foolish to drag a corpse that far,” Clara said bluntly. “Bury him here and go back to your son and your men. They need you. Gus can rest with my boys.” Call flinched when she said the word “son,” as if she had never had a doubt that Newt was his. He himself had once been a man of firm opinion, but now it seemed to him that he knew almost nothing, whereas the words Clara flung at him were hard as rocks.“I told him that very thing,” Call said. “I told him you’d likely want him here.” “I’ve always kept Gus where I wanted him, Mr. Call,” Clara said. “I kept him in my memory for sixteen years. Now we’re just talking of burying his body. Take him to the ridge and I’ll have July and Dish get a grave dug.” “Well, it wasn’t what he asked of me,” Call said, avoiding her eyes. “It seems that picnic spot you had in Texas is where he wanted to lay.” “Gus was a fine fool,” Clara said. “He was foolish for me or any other girl who would have him for a while. Because it was me he thought of, dying, is no reason to tote his bones all the way to Texas.” “It was because you picnicked in the place,” Call said, confused by her anger. He would have thought a woman would feel complimented by such a request, but Clara clearly didn’t take it that way.>>完整场景

Then, before he had scarcely reined in at Clara’s house, where he found Dish Boggett breaking horses with the young sheriff from Arkansas, the woman began a quarrel with him. She had acquired some small shrubs somehow and was out planting them, bareheaded and in overshoes, when he arrived.>>完整场景

“That woman gets half the money when you sell stock,” Call said. “It was Gus’s request. You can bank it for her in Miles City. I’ll tell her it’s there when I see her.” Newt could hardly believe he would be made boss over the men. He expected more orders, but the Captain turned away.>>完整场景

Still, Call had halved the money. However aggravating it was, Gus had meant it, and he would do it, though when he went back with the body he planned to see if he could at least buy her out. He didn’t like the thought of being in partnership with a woman, much less a whore—although he conceded that she might have reformed.>>完整场景

She was not there helping. Of course, if she had been there helping, there would have been trouble, but that didn’t lessen the aggravation of what Gus had done. He could simply have given her money—he had money. As it was, every time Call sold a bunch of stock to the Army he had to put aside half the money for a woman he had never approved of, who might, for all any of them knew, have already forgotten Gus and married someone else, or even gone back to being a whore.>>完整场景

IT CAME TO RANKLE CALL that Gus had left his half of the cattle herd to the woman. The woman was down in Nebraska.>>完整场景

“He didn’t get my attention,” Lorena said. “He didn’t get anything.” “And Gus did the same and got everything,” Clara said. “Gus was lucky and Dish isn’t.” “I ain’t either,” Lorena said.Clara offered no advice. A few days later, when she was sewing, Lorena came and stood in front of her. She looked no better. “Why did you ask me to stay, when it was you Gus loved?” she asked. “Why didn’t you ask him to stay? If you had he’d be alive.” Clara shook her head. “He loved us both,” she said, “but Gus would never miss an adventure. Not for you or me or any other woman. No one could have kept him home. He was a rake and a rambler, though you’d have kept him longer than I could have.” Lorena didn’t believe it. She remembered how often Gus had talked of Clara. Of course it no longer mattered—nothing like that mattered anymore, and yet she couldn’t keep her mind from turning to it.>>完整场景

She sat silently, not watching, while July sat just as silently. He could not help but wish that Dish Boggett had got lost in Wyoming or had somehow gone on to Texas. Hardly a day passed without him seeing what he thought were signs that Clara was taken with the man. Sooner or later, when Dish gave up on Lorena, he would be bound to notice. July felt helpless—there was nothing he could do about it. Sometimes he sat near Lorena, feeling that he had more in common with her than with anyone else at the ranch. She loved a dead man, he a woman who hardly noticed him. But whatever they had in common didn’t cause Lorena to so much as look his way. Lorena looked more beautiful than ever, but it was a grave beauty since news of the death had come. Only the young girl, Betsey, who loved Lorena completely, could occasionally bring a spark of life to her eyes. If Betsey was ill, Lorena nursed her tirelessly, taking her into her own bed and singing to her. They read stories together, Betsey doing the reading. Lorena could only piece out a few words—the sisters planned to teach her reading, but knew it would have to wait until she felt better.>>完整场景

“Would you ever marry me?” he asked. “You never said.” “No, and I’m not about to say now,” Clara said. “Ask me in a year.” “Why in a year?” “Because you deserve to suffer for a year,” Clara said. “I suffered a year’s worth just last night, and I guess you were lying at your ease, dreaming of our wedding night.” July had no reply. He had never known a woman who spoke so boldly. He looked at her through the fog of then-breath, wishing she would at least take the coat. The cold made goosebumps on her wrists.>>完整场景

“Just because it’s all you know don’t mean it’s all you’d enjoy,” Augustus said. “You had a chance at a fine widow right there in Lonesome Dove, as I recall.” Pea Eye was sorry the subject of widows had come up. He had nearly forgotten the Widow Cole and the day he had helped her take the washing off the line. He didn’t know why he hadn’t forgotten it completely—he surely had forgotten more important things. Yet there it was, and from time to time it shoved into his brain. If he had married some widow his brain would probably have been so full of such things that he would have no time to think, or even to keep his knife sharp.“Ever meet any of the mountain men?” Augustus asked. “They got up in here and took the beavers.” “Well, I met old Kit,” Pea Eye said. “You ought to remember. You was there.” “Yes, I remember,” Augustus said. “I never thought much of Kit Carson.” “Why, what was wrong with Kit Carson?” Pea Eye asked. “They say he could track anything.” “Kit was vain,” Augustus said. “I won’t tolerate vanity in a man, though I will in a woman. If I had gone north in my youth I might have got to be a mountain man, but I took to riverboating instead. The whores on them riverboats in my day barely wore enough clothes to pad a crutch.” As they rode north they saw more buffalo, mostly small bunches of twenty or thirty. The third day north of the Yellowstone they killed a crippled buffalo calf and dined on its liver. In the morning, when they left, there were a number of buzzards and two or three prairie wolves hanging around, waiting for them to leave the carcass.>>完整场景

They put the coffin in the front room, and July carried the frail corpse downstairs and put him in the coffin. Then, on Clara’s instructions, he rode off to inform the few neighbors and to find a preacher. Clara and Lorena and the girls sat with the body all night, while Cholo dug a grave on the ridge above the barn where the boys were buried. Betsey slept most of the night in Lorena’s arms—Clara thought it nice that she had taken to the young woman so.>>完整场景

Newt was happy with his new horse, which he named Candy. It was the first real gift he had ever been given in his life, and he talked to anyone who would listen of the wonderful woman on the Platte who knew how to break horses and conduct picnics too. His enthusiasm soon caused the other hands to be jealous, for they had accomplished nothing except a drunk in Ogallala, and had missed the nice picnic and the girls.>>完整场景

Yet when it had been simple, she had always worried that Gus didn’t want it. Maybe he was just being kind. She didn’t know—didn’t know what things meant, or didn’t mean. She had never expected to find, in the whole world, a place where someone would ask her to stay—even in her dreams of San Francisco no one had ever asked her to stay. She had seldom even spoken to a woman in her years in Lonesome Dove, and had no expectation that one would speak to her.>>完整场景

“You beat any woman I ever saw for taking the starch out of a man,” he said, a little perplexed. Despite all the complications, he felt his old love for her returning with its old power. So much feeling flooded him, just looking at her, that he felt shaky. It was a puzzle to him that such a thing could happen, for it was true she had become rather bony and her face had thinned too much, and certainly she was as taxing as a woman could be. And yet the feeling made him shaky.>>完整场景

“I never noticed you having such accidents with ugly girls,” Clara said. “I don’t care how it happened. You’ve been my dream, Gus. I used to think about you two or three hours a day.” “I wish you’d wrote, then,” he said.“I didn’t want you here,” she said. “I needed the dreams. I knew you for a rake and a rambler but it was sweet to pretend you only loved me.” “I do only love you, Clara,” he said. “I’ve grown right fond of Lorie, but it ain’t like this feeling I have for you.” “Well, she loves you,” Clara said. “It would destroy her if I was to have you. Don’t you know that?” “Yes, I know that,” Augustus said, thinking there would never again be such a woman as the one who looked at him with anger in her face.>>完整场景

“Oh, well,” Clara said, “yes and no. I’m too strong for the normal man and too jealous once my feelings get started. I’m surprised you dare bring another woman into my house.” “I thought you liked her,” he said.>>完整场景

“He’s been that way two months,” she said. “I guess he sees some, but I don’t think he hears.” “It reminds me of old Tom Mustard,” Augustus said. “He rangered with us when we started the troop. His horse went over a cutbank on the salt fork of the Brazos one night and fell on him. Broke his back. Tom never moved a muscle after that, but his eyes were open when we found him. We started back to Austin with Tom on a travois, but he died a week later. He never closed his eyes in all that time, that I know of.” “I wish Bob would go,” Clara said. “He’s no use to himself like this. All Bob liked to do was work, and now he can’t.” They walked out on the little upper porch, where it was cooler. “Why’d you come up here, Gus?” she asked. “You ain’t a cowboy.” “The truth is, I was hoping to find you a widow,” he said. “I didn’t miss by much, either.” Clara was amused that her old beau would be so blunt. “You missed by years,” she said. “I’m a bony old woman now and you’re a deceiving man, anyway. You always were a deceiving man. I think the best thing would be for you to leave me your bride to be and I’ll see if I can give her some polish.” “I never meant to get in the position I’m in, to be truthful,” Augustus said.>>完整场景

“Captain,” she said, “there’s a three-year-old sorrel gelding with a white star on his forehead in this lot you bought. I want to give that horse to Newt, so don’t let anyone have him. You can deduct him from the price.” “Give it to him?” Call asked, surprised. Newt, who overheard, was surprised too. The woman who drove such a hard bargain wanted to give him a horse.>>完整场景

As he was coming down the steps, Clara stopped him. She put an arm across his shoulder and walked him to his horse. No woman had ever done such a thing with him.>>完整场景

“Yes, I’m right,” Clara said. “You ain’t answered my question.” “His mother was a woman named Maggie,” he said. “She was a whore. She died when Newt was six.” “I like that boy,” Clara said. “I’d keep him too, if I got the chance. He’s about the age my Jimmy would be, if Jimmy had lived.” “Newt’s a fine boy,” Augustus said.>>完整场景

“Well, it’s a stiff price, but they’re good horses,” Call said, wondering how the men could bring themselves to work for such a testy woman.>>完整场景

The woman turned, and as she did, she looked at Newt. Before he could drop his eyes she had caught him looking at her in turn. He felt greatly embarrassed, but to his surprise Clara smiled again, a friendly smile that vanished when she turned back to the Captain.>>完整场景