（外文电子版资料）Joanna Russ - Second Inquisition.pdf

file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/New%20Folder/Joanna%20Russ%20-%20Second%20Inquisition.txt VERSION 1.0 DTD 032700 THE SECOND INQUISITION Joanna Russ If a man can resist the influences of his townsfolk, if she can cut free from the tyranny of neighborhood gossip, the world has no terrors for him; there is no second inquisition. -John Jay Chapman I often watched our visitor reading in the living room, sitting under the floor lamp near the new, standing Philco radio, with her long, long legs stretched out in front of her and the pool -of light on her book revealing so little of her face: brownish, coppery features so marked that she seemed to be a kind of freak and hair that was reddish black .but so rough that it looked like ,the things my mother used for .scouring pots and pans. She read a great deal, that summer. If I ventured out of the archway, where I was not exactly hiding but only keeping in the shadow to watch her read, she would often raise her face and smile silently at me before beginning to read again, and her skin would take on an abrupt, surprising pallor as it moved into the light. When she goat up -and went into the kitchen with the gracefulness of a stork, for something to eat, she was almost too tall for the doorways; she went on legs like a spiders, with long swinging arms and a little body in the middle, the strange proportions of the very tall. She looked down at my mothers plates and dishes from a great, gentle height, remarkably absorbed; and asking me a few odd questions, she would bend down over whatever she was going to eat, meditate on it for a few moments like a giraffe, and then straightening up back into the stratosphere, she would pick up the plate in one thin hand, curling around it fingers like legs, and go back gracefully into-the living room. She would lower herself into the chair that was always too small, curl her legs around it, become dissatisfied, settle herself, stretch them o