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

should not look at, the lady mouse with a big belly and two little mice
inside (who were playing chess), then the little mice coming out in
separate envelopes and finally= the whole family having a picnic, with
somethings around' the picnic basket that I did not recognize and
underneath in capital letters "I did not bring up my children to test-';
cigarettes." This left me blank. She laughed and rubbed it out, saying
that it was out of date. Then she drew a white
mouse with a rolled-up umbrella chasing my mother. I
picked that up and looked at it for a while; then I tore it
into pieces, and tore the others into pieces as well. I said,
"I don't think you have the slightest right to-" and
stopped. She was looking at me with not anger exactly
-not warning exactly-I found I had to sit down. I
began to cry.

"Ah! The results of practical psychology," she said dryly, gathering up
the pieces of her sketches. She took matches off the whatnot and set
fire to the pieces in a saucer. She held up the smoking match between
her thumb and forefinger, saying, "You see? The finger is-shall we say,
perception?-but the thumb is money. The thumb is hard."

"You oughtn't to treat my parents that way!" I said, crying.

"You ought not to tear up my sketches," she said calmly.

"Why not! Why not!" I shouted.

"Because they are worth money," she said, "in some quarters. I won't
draw you any more," and indifferently taking the saucer with the ashes
in it in one palm, she went into the kitchen. I heard her voice and then
my mother's and then my mother's again, anal then our visitor's in a
tone that would've made a rock weep, but I never found out what they
said.

I passed our guest's room many times at night that summer, going in by
the hall past her rented room where the second-floor windows gave out
onto the dark garden. The electric lights were always on brilliantly. My
mother had sewn the white curtains because she did everything like
that and had bought the furniture at a sale: marbletopped bureau, the
wardrobe, the iron bedstead, an old Victrola against the wall. There was
usually an open book on the bed. I would stand in the shadow of the
open doorway and look across the bare wood floor, too much of it and
all as slippery as the sea, bare wood waxed and shining in the electric
light. A black dress hung on the front of the wardrobe and a pair of
shoes like my mother's, T-strap shoes with thick heels. I used to
wonder if she had silver evening slippers inside the wardrobe.

Sometimes the open book on the bed was Wells's The Time Machine
and then I would talk to the black glass of the window, I would say :to
the transparent reflections and the black branches of trees that moved