He looked at me in startled happiness, then his thoughts rushed on.
“Lola, if you had lived a long time ago—or even today in some corners of Europe—you would be picked as a corn maiden. Your intense femininity, expressed in beauty and passion, would have made you the people’s choice. You would have gone through a ritualistic marriage with a corn spirit so that the crops would be bumper. From that to being a corn goddess is a short—a perfectly credible—step. The people wouldn’t be fooled. They’d see in you an incarnation of the life-giving force of nature, and whether you call it divinity or beauty is mere verbiage.”
“I used to imagine that I was the incarnation of Râdhâ, the cowherdess, Krishna’s beloved.”
“Perhaps you are. Her last incarnation before the last god dies and the machines
