Ева Траут

'...They were people of courage; that stood out — what could not be surmounted? Don't think I am blaming you, Eva/ At the worst, I suppose you were their mischance — that you should make your home with them seemed right, natural: and so it could have been? I shall never come to the end of my own penitence, felt so much too late, and so unavailing. They were not my flock, God help them — they were my neighbours. What is the good of one? — what's the good of it all?'

'What you are suffering from,' diagnosed Henry, blinking at his reflection in the glaze of the teapot, ' is guilt, not penitence.'

Mr Dancey, bored, said: 'Just as you like.'

'The distinction's rather importance, I should have thought. Penitence is a reflex, guilt is a state.'

Once into the drawing-room, one saw why. <...> Outstanding examples of everything auro-visual on the market this year, 1959, where ranged round the surprised walls: large-screen television set, sonorous-looking radio, radio-gramophone in a teak coffin, other gramophone with attendant stereo cabinets, sixteen-millimetre projector with screen ready, a recording instrument of B.B.C. proportions, not to be written off as a tape-recorder. Other importations: a superb typewriter shared a metal-legged table with a cash register worthy to be its mate; and an intercom, whose purposes seemed uncertain, had been installed. What looked like miles of flex matted the parquet. Electronics had driven the old guard, the Circe armchairs, into a huddle in the middle of the floor: some were covered in dust-sheets and some not.<...>

'Well, I must say, Eva!'

'Yes,' said Eva contentedly.

'You understand all these?'

'I am learning to. — Will you have tea, Iseult?'

'I don't think so, thank you. A drink later?'

'My computer will be going into the dining-room.'

'Oh, really, Eva, how can you need a computer!'

'It thinks,' said the girl, looking aggrieved. 'That is what you used to tell me to do.'

'... But surely, Eva,' he said most earnestly, 'in these days, and in that progressive country you've been in, something could have been done, has been done; what is being done?'

'Everything! — that is to say, very, very much.' Eva spoke with passion that yet had somewhere in it a hint of evasion. 'But Jeremy doesn't like it; he doesn't want to. He not only doesn't co-operate, they all tell me, he puts a resistance up. He is angered by what they attempt to do to him. It upsets him. He would like to stay happy the way he is.'

'Many of us would; but that's not the thing. — Oh come, Eva, who would not wish to speak?'

'I have never wished to. What is the object? What is the good?'

Примечание для тех, кто не знаком с содержанием романа. Мистер Данси спрашивает Еву о том, какие попытки она предприняла ради лечения Джереми (ее глухонемого ребенка).