胡敏读故事记考研词汇mp3+文本(56) a

After he had been at the school for a year, Billy started to reap the benefits of a boarding school education. The temptation to play the rebel had disappeared, and although from time to time he would recall his unhappiness during those few weeks after his arrival, the mood of desolation did not recur.

The memory would surely soon recede into the distance, rather like telegraph poles receded as you watch them through the rear view mirror of a car. He had recently started to recover his wild sense of humor, and this also served to reassure him that the worst hours he could recollect after his arrival at the school would never recur. In short, he had become a willing recruit to the system, and when asked, he said he would willingly recommend a boarding school environment to anyone. He no longer felt uneasy at being separated from his parents, and he could reconcile his apparent independence with his love for his mother by pointing out that this feeling was reciprocal, his mother had not sent him to boarding school to get rid of him, but because she had been forced to recognize that there simply was no adequate day school in the town in which they lived.

In this way, Billy was able to reclaim his childhood innocence and, to some degree, recreate his original demeanor of reckless abandon. Besides, after his first tearful phone call from school two days after he arrived, his mother had not been slow to take steps to rectify the situation, and ever since that first call home, Billy had been delighted to receive, every couple of weeks or so, a box of fudge cookies baked to his mother’s own original recipe. Of course he shared the cookies with his classmates, which made him quite popular in his own dormitory. These feasts also made him the envy of the other students who could always tell when they had missed one on account of the appearance of a large cardboard box full of crumbs in the school’s recycle bin.

Reclaimable rubbish collected in this bin was sent to a specialized plain where, reclaimed, it could be separated into grades and recycled for further reuse.

In fact, Billy used to reckon that if he ate his mother’s cookies at the rate he was going, in fifty years he would have created enough waste paper to publish the first volume of his memoirs.