"Very well," said Shabis. "You start, Dann. What kind of work do you think you'd be good at, on the farm?"

Dann ignored him, looked straight at his sister, and said, "Mara, tell me honestly, no, truthfully, the real truth: when you wake up in the morning, isn't it the first thing you think of — how far you're going to go today, one foot after another, another little bit of the way up Ifrik? And the two of us together? Even if the thing you think about after that is Shabis?"

Mara took her time, smiling at him, eyes full of tears. "Yes," she said, "yes, it's true, but."

"I just wanted to hear you say it," said Dann.

DORIS LESSING was born of British parents in Persia in 1919, and moved with her family to Southern Rhodesia when she was five years old. She went to England in 1949 and has lived there ever since. She is the author of more than thirty books — novels, stories, reportage, poems, and plays. Her most recent works include two volumes of autobiography, Under My Skin and Walking in the Shade, and a novel, Love, Again.

Copyright

MARA AND DANN. Copyright © 1999 by Doris Lessing. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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