That Hideous Strength (The Space Trilogy #3)

by C.S. Lewis

She liked her clothes to be rather severe and in colors that were really good on serious esthetic grounds—clothes which would make it plain to everyone that she was an intelligent adult and not a woman of the chocolate-box variety—and

If he guessed very little of the maladjustment between them, this was partly due to our race’s incurable habit of “projection.” We think the lamb gentle because its wool is soft to our hands: men call a woman voluptuous when she arouses voluptuous feelings in them. Jane’s body, soft though firm and slim though rounded, was so exactly to Mark’s mind that it was all but impossible for him not to attribute

Did men and women both feel interested in the female body and even, though it sounded ridiculous, in almost the same way? A sentence rose to her memory. “The beauty of the female is the root of joy to the female as well as to the male, and it is no accident that the goddess of Love is older and stronger than the god.”

To desire the desiring of her own beauty is the vanity of Lilith, but to desire the enjoying of her own beauty is the obedience of Eve, and to both it is in the lover that the beloved tastes her own delightfulness. As obedience is the stairway of pleasure, so humility is the

Mark was not as a rule very sensitive to beauty, but Jane and his love for Jane had already awakened him a little in this respect.