"John Norman - Gor 22 - Dancer of Gor " - читать интересную книгу автора (Norman John)

could scarcely get my breath. I lifted my eyes then again to the
figure in the mirror. She was not large, but I thought she might be
pretty. But it is hard to be objective about such thing. I supposed
there could be criteria, of one sort or another, in some place or
another, of a somewhat ascertainable, quantitative sort, perhaps
what men might be willing to pay for you, but even then they would
probably be paying for a spectrum of desirablilities, of which
pettiness, per se, might be only one, and perhaps not even the most
important. I did not know. I suppose even more important would be
what a woman looked like to a given man and what he thought he
could do with her, or, seeing her, knew he could do with her. I
looked at the figure in the mirror. Her nightgown, ankle length, was
of white cotton. It seemed rather demure, or timid, I supposed, but
there was little doubt that there was a female, and perhaps a rather
attractive one, though, to be sure, that would be a judgment for men
to more properly make, within it. There were the stains of tears on
the cheeks of the girl facing me in the mirror, I noted. She trembled.
Her lips moved. Why was she afraid? At what she saw in the
mirror? It was herself, surely. Why should she fear that? I saw she
wore a nightgown. I liked that. I did not like pajamas. To be sure,
she was perhaps too feminine for a woman in these times, but then
there are such women, in spite of all. They are real, and their needs
are real. I looked at her. Yes, I thought, she was objectively



8
pretty. There was no doubt about it. To be sure, she might not seem
so to a crocodile or a tree but she should seem such to a male of her
species, and that was what counted. Yes, that was what counted,
objectively. To be sure, he would doubtless wish to see if the rest of
her matched her face. Men were with that. They were like traders of
horses and breeders of dogs, interested in the whole female. I again
regarded the girl in the mirror. Yes, I thought, she was too feminine,
at least for these times. This was not the sort of woman wanted in
our times. She was like something beautiful stranded on a foreign
beach. Surely she belonged in another time or place. She seemed in
her hormones and beauty, in her needs, like a stranger flung out of
time. There she stood in a world alien to her deepest nature, not a
man, and not wanting to be one, a victim of time and heredity, of
her genetic depths, of biology and history. How lonely and
unbefriended, how frustrated, unfulfilled and doleful she was. How
tragic is she indeed, I thought, whom the lies on oneтАЩs time fail to
nourish. I looked again at the girl in the mirror. Surely she might
better have cooked meat in the light of a cave fire, the thongs on her
left wrist perhaps marking whose woman she was, or with sistrum
and hymns, under the orders of priests, welcomed the grand,
redemptive, sluggish flows of the Nile; better she had run barefoot
on a lonely Aegean beach, her himation gathered to her knees, a
fillet of white wool in her hair, watching for oared ships; better she