"Шервуд Андерсен. Триумф яйца (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автора

said I gathered that until that evening he had hardly noticed the
woman. I suppose that of all the men in the house he had been the most
indifferent to her. In the room something happened. The landlady
followed the woman when she ran to LeRoy, and the two women confronted
him. The woman from Iowa knelt trembling and frightened at his feet.
The landlady was indignant. LeRoy acted on impulse. An inspiration came
to him. Putting his hand on the kneeling woman's shoulder he shook her
violently. "Now behave yourself," he said quickly. "I will keep my
promise." He turned to the landlady and smiled. "We have been engaged
to be married," he said. "We have quarreled. She came here to be near
me. She has been unwell and excited. I will take her away. Please don't
let yourself be annoyed. I will take her away."

When the woman and LeRoy got out of the house she stopped weeping and
put her hand into his. Her fears had all gone away. He found a room for
her in another house and then went with her into a park and sat on a
bench.

* * * * *

Everything LeRoy has told me concerning this woman strengthens my
belief in what I said to the man that day in the mountains. You cannot
venture along the road of lives. On the bench he and the woman talked
until midnight and he saw and talked with her many times later. Nothing
came of it. She went back, I suppose, to her place in the West.

In the place from which she had come the woman had been a teacher of
music. She was one of four sisters, all engaged in the same sort of
work and, LeRoy says, all quiet capable women. Their father had died
when the eldest girl was not yet ten, and five years later the mother
died also. The girls had a house and a garden.

In the nature of things I cannot know what the lives of the women were
like but of this one may be quite certain--they talked only of women's
affairs, thought only of women's affairs. No one of them ever had a
lover. For years no man came near the house.

Of them all only the youngest, the one who came to Chicago, was visibly
affected by the utterly feminine quality of their lives. It did
something to her. All day and every day she taught music to young girls
and then went home to the women. When she was twenty-five she began to
think and to dream of men. During the day and through the evening she
talked with women of women's affairs, and all the time she wanted
desperately to be loved by a man. She went to Chicago with that hope in
mind. LeRoy explained her attitude in the matter and her strange
behavior in the west-side house by saying she had thought too much and
acted too little. "The life force within her became decentralized," he
declared. "What she wanted she could not achieve. The living force
within could not find expression. When it could not get expressed in
one way it took another. Sex spread itself out over her body. It