he first three sheets were all like that. The fourth was a perfectly good Petrarchian sonnet reviling the current administration and the political party of which Len was a registration-day member.
The fifth was hand-lettered in the Cyrillic alphabet and illustrated with geometric diagrams. Len put it down and stared shakily at Moira.
"No, go on," she said, "read the rest."
The sixth and seventh were obscene limericks; and the eighth, ninth and so on to the end of the stack were what looked like the first chapters of a rattling good historical adventure novel.
Its chief characters were Cyrus the Great, his jaunty-bosomed daughter Lygea, of whom Len had never previously heard, and a one-armed Graeco-Mede adventurer named Xanthes. There were also courtesans, spies, apparitions, scullery slaves, oracles, cutthroats, lepers, priests and men-at-arms in magnificent profusion.
"He's decided," said Moira, "what he wants to be when he's born."
Leo refused to bothered with mundane details. When there were eighty pages of the manuscript, it was Moira who invented a title and by-line for it—The Virgin of Persepolis by Leon Lenn—and mailed it off to a literary agent in New York. His response, a week later, was cautiously enthusiastic. He asked for an outline of the remainder of the novel.
Moira replied that this was impossible, trying to sound as unworldly and impenetrably artistic as she could. She enclosed the thirty-odd pages Leo had turned out through her in the meantime.