"Spider Robinson - Too Soon We Grow Old" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

in what was, for her, a remarkably short time. As she realized this, alarm made one
last attempt to take over her controls, but failed.
"тАж clearly done a number of remarkable things with your half-century, Diana,"
Hold was saying with obvious sincerity. "Today it is no longer inconceivable for a
woman to become wealthy by her own efforts in the economic marketplaceтАФbut
you began your fantastic career in an age when as a rule, only men had such
opportunities. In fact, you've done as much as, perhaps more than anyone to bring
our society out of that restrictive phase."
The words warmed her. "Oh," she said lightly. "It's not a difficult trick to become
terribly rich. 'All it takes is a lifetime of devotion.'"
"I'm familiar with the quote," Hold agreed. "All the same, it must have been an
incredibly difficult, demanding task to carve yourself a navigable path where none
existed. And so perhaps the foremost question in my mind is, why?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"Why did you choose the life you have led? What was your motivation for this
lifetime of devotion?"
"Because," she said almost automatically, "given the nature of the world I found
myself in, it seemed the most sensible, the most matureтАж the most grownup thing to
do."
"I'm not sure I understand," Hold said, and he was the best in his field, because he
had the rare gift of listening totally, of conveying by his utter attention to her every
gesture and nuance his eagerness to understand. Since everyone knows that to
understand is to forgive all, no one who genuinely wishes to understand can be an
enemyтАФcan they?тАФand so she found herself explaining to another the agony that
had been her childhood.
"тАж and so with Father dead and five girls to raise, Mother entered the business
world. She had toтАФFather's insurance company flatly refused to pay. They claimed
it was clearly a suicide, and three judges agreed. There was still a sizable estate, of
course, but after the deduction of lawyers' fees and nonrefundable losing bids on
three judges, it wasn't enough to provide for all six of us for very long. So Mother
converted it all to capital and tried to become a business woman, about the time I
was twelve. In today's world she might have succeededтАФbut she was terribly
ignorant and naive. Father's inherited wealth had sheltered her as effectively as it had
him. The only people who paid her any attention, let alone respect, were the sharks,
and they had picked her clean by the time I was twenty. That wasтАж let me seeтАж
1965 or 66.
"And so it was up to me, the eldest. Mother had gotten clever in the final extremity:
no one ever called her death anything but accidental. But even so, the inheritance I
received was almost nominal.
"But it was enough, for me and for my sisters."
"Clearly," Hold agreed. "Then you would say your initial motivation was to
provide for yourself and your sisters."
 "More for them than for myself," she said, and was gratified to hear herself say so.
"Mother had passed on to me her own overwhelming sense of responsibility. As
matter of fact, my own strongest interest was in music. But I knew I could never
provide five siblings on a musician's wages, and so I put all that away and buckled
down."
"You must be deeply happy, then," he said, "to have so thoroughly realized your
life's ambition."
And she surprised herself. "No. No, I can't say that I am."