the thorn birds colleen mccullough

indefinable air of breeding which everyone felt immediately; so did
the Annunzio family. As eager as Teresa to woo her, they gave her
big fat potato chips fried in sizzling cauldrons of lamb dripping, and
a piece of boned fish which tasted delicious, dipped as it was in
floury batter and fried in the smoking well of liquid fat along with
the chips, only in a separate wire basket. Meggie had never eaten
food so delicious, and wished she could lunch at the cafe more
often. But this had been a treat, requiring special permission from
her mother and the nuns. Her conversation at home was all "Teresa
says" and "Do you know what Teresa did?" until Paddy roared that
he had heard more than enough about Teresa. "I don't know that it's
such a good idea to be too thick with Dagos," he muttered, sharing
the British community's instinctive mistrust of any dark or
Mediterranean people. "Dagos are dirty, Meggie girl, they don't
wash too often," he explained lamely, wilting under the look of hurt
reproach Meggie gave him.
Fiercely jealous, Frank agreed with him. So Meggie spoke less
often of her friend when she was at home. But home disapproval
couldn't interfere with the relationship, confined as it was by
distance to school days and hours; Bob and the boys were only too
pleased to see her utterly engrossed in Teresa. It left them to career
madly around the playground just as if their sister did not exist.
The unintelligible things Sister Agatha was always writing on the
blackboard gradually began to make sense, and Meggie learned that
a "plus was meant you counted all the numbers up to a total, where
a "com" meant you took the numbers on the bottom away from the
numbers on the top and wound up with less than you had in the first