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

two strides, and folding herself carefully down into .her breakfast chair,
from where her knees stuck out, she reached across the table, picked
up The Green Hat, propped it up next to her plate and began to read it
with great absorption. Then she looked up. "You have a very
progressive library," she said. "I took .the liberty of recommending this
exciting book to your daughter. You told me it was your favorite. You
sent all the way to New York City on purpose far it, yes?"

"I don't-I quite-" said my mother, pushing back her chair from the
table. My mother was trembling from head to foot and her face was set
in an expression of fixed distaste. Our visitor regarded first my mother
and then my

father, bending over .then tenderly and with exquisite interest. She said:

"I hope you do not mind my using your library."

"No no no," muttered my father.

"I eat almost for two," said our visitor modestly, "because of my
height. I hope you do not mind that?"

"No, of course not," said my father, regaining control of himself.

"Good. It is all considered in the bill," said the visitor,. and looking
about at my shrunken parents, each hurried, each spooning in the food
and avoiding her gaze, she added deliberately:

"I took also another liberty. I removed from the end-' papers certain-ah-
-drawings that I did not ,think bore any relation to the text. You do not
mind?"

And as my father and mother looked in shocked surprise and utter
consternation-at each other-she said to me in a low voice, "Don't eat.
You'll make yourself sick," and then smiled warmly at the two of them
when my ; mother went off into the kitchen and my father on to the he
was lane for work. She waved at them. I jumped up as soon as they
were out of the room.

"There were no drawings in that book!" I whispered.

"Then we must make some," said she, and taking a pencil off the
whatnot, she drew in the endpapers of the book a series of sketches:
the heroine sipping a soda in an ice-cream parlor, showing her legs and
very chic; in a sloppy bathing suit and big grin, holding up a large fish;-
r driving her Hispano-Suiza into a tree only to be catapulted straight
up into the air; and in the last sketch landing demure and coy in the
arms of the hero, who looked violently surprised. Then she drew a
white mouse putting on lipstick, getting married to another white
mouse in a , church, the two entangled in some manner I thought I