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

permeated the very fibre of her being. At the last she was sex
personified, sex become condensed and impersonal. Certain words, the
touch of a man's hand, sometimes even the sight of a man passing in the
street did something to her."

* * * * *

Yesterday I saw LeRoy and he talked to me again of the woman and her
strange and terrible fate.

We walked in the park by the lake. As we went along the figure of the
woman kept coming into my mind. An idea came to me.

"You might have been her lover," I said. "That was possible. She was
not afraid of you."

LeRoy stopped. Like the doctor who was so sure of his ability to walk
into lives he grew angry and scolded. For a moment he stared at me and
then a rather odd thing happened. Words said by the other man in the
dusty road in the hills came to LeRoy's lips and were said over again.
The suggestion of a sneer played about the corners of his mouth. "How
smart we are. How aptly we put things," he said.

The voice of the young man who walked with me in the park by the lake
in the city became shrill. I sensed the weariness in him. Then he
laughed and said quietly and softly, "It isn't so simple. By being sure
of yourself you are in danger of losing all of the romance of life. You
miss the whole point. Nothing in life can be settled so definitely. The
woman--you see--was like a young tree choked by a climbing vine. The
thing that wrapped her about had shut out the light. She was a
grotesque as many trees in the forest are grotesques. Her problem was
such a difficult one that thinking of it has changed the whole current
of my life. At first I was like you. I was quite sure. I thought I
would be her lover and settle the matter."

LeRoy turned and walked a little away. Then he came back and took hold
of my arm. A passionate earnestness took possession of him. His voice
trembled. "She needed a lover, yes, the men in the house were quite
right about that," he said. "She needed a lover and at the same time a
lover was not what she needed. The need of a lover was, after all, a
quite secondary thing. She needed to be loved, to be long and quietly
and patiently loved. To be sure she is a grotesque, but then all the
people in the world are grotesques. We all need to be loved. What would
cure her would cure the rest of us also. The disease she had is, you
see, universal. We all want to be loved and the world has no plan for
creating our lovers."

LeRoy's voice dropped and he walked beside me in silence. We turned
away from the lake and walked under trees. I looked closely at him. The
cords of his neck were drawn taut. "I have seen under the shell of life