THREEThe Rector
The face of the woman riding in the bus was so garishly made up that at first glance all her features seemed quite separate from each other — the exhausted eyes in a funereal frame of mascara, the thickly-rouged cheeks and the rapacious scarlet mouth. She was holding her two sons of five and six by the collars of their white shirts, and they were struggling to break free with all the stubbornness of young puppies unused to the leash.
Her mind was focused sombrely on the conversation to come and she paid no attention to the passengers watching with stern disapproval as those two wriggling, jerking, suspended bodies struggled to break free from her grasp. The woman was indifferent to the unspoken indignation of the people around her, but even if she had been sensitive to th
