"Seond Inquisition by Joanna Russ" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nebula Award Stories 6)

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THE SECOND INQUISITION

Joanna Russ

If a man can resist the influences of his townsfolk, if she can cut free
from the tyranny of neighborhood gossip, the world has no terrors for
him; there is no second inquisition.

-John Jay Chapman

I often watched our visitor reading in the living room, sitting under the
floor lamp near the new, standing Philco radio, with her long, long legs
stretched out in front of her and the pool -of light on her book revealing
so little of her face: brownish, coppery features so marked that she
seemed to be a kind of freak and hair that was reddish black .but so
rough that it looked like ,the things my mother used for .scouring pots
and pans. She read 'a great deal, that summer. If I ventured out of the
archway, where I was not exactly hiding but only keeping in the
shadow to watch her read, she would often raise her face and smile
silently at me before beginning to read again, and her skin would take on
an abrupt, surprising pallor as it moved into the light. When she goat
up -and went into the kitchen with the gracefulness of a stork, for
something to eat, she was almost too tall for the doorways; she went
on legs like a spider's, with long swinging arms and a little body in the
middle, the strange proportions of the very tall. She looked down at my
mother's plates and dishes from a great, gentle height, remarkably
absorbed; and asking me a few odd questions, she would bend down
over whatever she was going to eat, meditate on it for a few moments
like a giraffe, and then straightening up back into the stratosphere, she
would pick up the plate in one thin hand, curling around it fingers like
legs, and go back gracefully into-the living room. She would lower
herself into the chair that was always too small, curl her legs around it,
become dissatisfied, settle herself, stretch them out again-I remember so
well those long, hard, unladylike legs-and begin again to read.

She used to ask, "What is that? What is that? And what, is this?" but
that was only at first.

My mother, who disliked her, said she was from the circus and we
ought to try to understand and be kind.: My father made jokes. He did
not like big women or short -hair--which was still new in places like
ours- women who read, although she was interested in his carpentry
and he liked that.

But she was six feet four inches tall; this was in 1925.

My father was an accountant who built furniture as a: hobby; we had a
gas stove which he actually fixed once when it broke down and some