Free The Balloonist by MacDonald Harris Page B

hardly think you would like that. As for the tasks men and women are adapted for, you make too much of the difference. The parts of the human body that distinguish the sexes”—(second appearance of the pink spider; I plunged on)—”are the most ephemeral. In skeletons they are hardly discernible except to an expert. Whereas, comparing man with ape, the skeletal difference is apparent even to a layman. I wonder where you get your opinions about intuitions and such things?”
    But one of her qualities that I learned immediately was that she never answered questions. To frame a remark to her in the form of a question was to distract her instantly into another subject, as though by an invisible system of switches. “Do you know the dramas of Strindberg?”
    â€œI have never been to a play in my life.”
    â€œSo much the worse for you. You talk as though you had read him. He is mad of course. I can assure you I am perfectly able to afford Leyden jars and coils of wire, and I would adore ascending in an airship. I have a book of engravings about the frères Montgolfier. It’s a pity you haven’t read Strindberg. It might have armed you against me. As it is, you are my victim. Captain, please come to tea at my aunt’s. It is perfectly proper, she belongs to the best society of the Île Saint-Louis. You can explain your emanations to her, and perhaps you might give me a list of the apparatus I ought to buy.”
    I said that I would or I wouldn’t, I don’t know what I said, but the outcome was that I actually presented myself at the house on Quai d’Orléans on the following day, dressed like an idiot in a white shirt and patent-leather pumps. The aunt maintained a curious establishment. It was hard to say whether it was respectable or not. Luisa in stressing its propriety had perhaps slightly overemphasized the point, since what was the purpose of mentioning this if there wasn’t some slight doubt about it? The whole family had a characteristic quality of raffishness combined with the greatest kind of dignity, a juxtaposition that reappeared in the various members in various disguises but was always recognizable once you were familiar with it. Perhaps it owed this to its ancestry, which tendedtoward the mongrelish, although in a highly aristocratic way. The American father by this time was of course not on the scene, since he had gone back to his own country through some complicated circumstances that I didn’t quite follow and had died in an attack on an Apache camp in New Mexico in 1875. This exotic demise was evidently not considered comme il faut in the family, since he was never spoken of. In addition to his debts he left to his family only the quintessentially transatlantic name of Hickman, which everyone concealed as though it were an unfortunate secret. His widow, Luisa’s mother, evidently lived as a kind of dependent and companion of the aunt, wore saris and even a caste mark on her brow, although she was three quarters of European blood, and did nothing in particular except drink tea and eat sticky Levantine pastries. She was not held in very high regard among the Silva e Costas, perhaps because of her marriage to the handsome but penniless American frontiersman. The aunt was a spinster. Her long face tended slightly to the equine and her eyebrows sloped a little outward, like the eaves of a house. She shared the ivory family complexion, although in her case it had been marred by a childhood smallpox that had lent it a kind of lunar and irregular texture like weathered alabaster, or satin from an old wardrobe. She also suffered slightly from a chorea-like affliction that caused slight and almost imperceptible movements of her face: the chin, fixed as it were by effort, nevertheless tremored to the left a fraction of a millimeter or less, once or so a second, returning immediately to its former position, in a movement so subtle and so faint that