"Patricia A. McKillip - The Snow Queen" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKillip Patricia A)

have forgotten?"
"Love?" someone said perplexedly. Neva touched her brow

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The Snow Queen


delicately.
"I cannot," she said, "remember the Latin word for dance."
"You do it so well," Kay said a moment later, as they glided onto
the floor. So polished it was that the flames from the chandeliers
seemed frozen underfoot, as if they danced on stars. "And no one
studies Latin anymore."
"I never tire of learning," Neva said. Her gloved hand lay lightly on
his shoulder, close to his neck. Even in winter his skin looked
warm, burnished by tropical skies, endless sun. She wanted to cover
that warmth with her body, draw it into her own white-marble skin.
Her 'eyes flicked constantly around the room over his shoulder,
studying women's faces. "Who is Gerda?" she asked, then knew her:
the tall, beautiful childlike woman who watched Kay with a
hopeless, forlorn expression, as if she had already lost him.
"She is my wife," Kay said, with a studied balance of lightness and
indifference in his voice. Neva lifted her hand off his shoulder,
settled it again closer to his skin.
"Ah."
"We have known each other all our lives."
"She loves you still."
"How do you know?" he said, surprised. She guided him into a half-
turn, so that for a moment he faced his abandoned Gerda, with her
sad eyes and downturned mouth, standing in her naive black dress,
her champagne tilted and nearly spilling, with only a cadaverous,
beaky man trying to get her attention. Neva turned him again; he
looked at her, blinking, as if he had been lightly, unexpectedly

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The Snow Queen


struck. She shifted her hand, crooked her fingers around his bare
neck.
"She is very beautiful."
"Yes."
"It is her air of childlike innocence that is so appealing."
"And so exasperating," he exclaimed suddenly, as if, like the
Apostle, he had been illumined by lightning and stunned with truth.
"Innocence can be," Neva said.
"Gerda knows so little of life. We have lived for years in this city
and still she seems so helpless. Scattered. She doesn't know what
she wants from life; she wouldn't know how to take it if she did."
"Some women never learn."