О дивный новый мир / Brave New World

She looked up with a certain anxiety. “But you don’t think I’m too plump, do you?”

He shook his head. Like so much meat.

“You think I’m all right.” Another nod. “In every way?”

“Perfect,” he said aloud. And inwardly. “She thinks of herself that way. She doesn’t mind being meat.”

“All the same,” he went on, after a little pause, “I still rather wish it had all ended differently. I didn’t want it to end with our going to bed. Not at once, not the first day.

“But then what …?”

He began to talk a lot of incomprehensible and dangerous nonsense. Lenina did her best to stop the ears of her mind; but every now and then a phrase would insist on becoming audible.

“I want to know what passion is,” she heard him saying. “I want to feel something strongly.”

“When the individual feels, the community reels,” Lenina pronounced.

“Well, why shouldn’t it reel a bit?”

“Bernard!”

“Adults intellectually and during working hours,” he went on.

“I don’t understand.” Lenina’s tone was firm.

“I know you don’t. And that’s why we went to bed together yesterday—like infants—instead of being adults and waiting.”

“But it was fun,” Lenina insisted. “Wasn’t it?”

“Oh, the greatest fun,” he answered, but in a voice so mournful, that Lenina felt all her triumph suddenly evaporate.

“I told you so,” was all that Fanny said. “It’s the alcohol they put in his surrogate.”

“All the same[25 - All the same – Все равно],” Lenina insisted. “I do like him. But I wish he weren’t so odd.”

2

Stopping for a moment outside the door of the Director’s room, Bernard drew a deep breath. He knocked and entered.

“A permit for you to sign, Director,” he said as airily as possible, and laid the paper on the writing-table.

The Director glanced at him sourly. But the stamp of the World Controller’s Office was at the head of the paper and the signature of Mustapha Mond, bold and black, across the bottom. Everything was perfectly in order. The director had no choice. He signed and was about to return the paper without a word of comment, when his eye was caught by something written in the permit.