He paused in the doorway. The girl was sitting cross-legged on a small mat, a book open on her lap. Xenophon's _Anabasis_. Her hair made him think of the copper-colored sunrises of Norma 9 and her eyes reminded him of the blue tarns of Fornax 6. "Come in," she said. After closing the door, he sat down opposite her on the guest mat. Behind her, a gaudy arras hid the hut's other room. "You are here to wait for Eldoria?" she asked. Blake nodded. "And you?" She laughed. "I am here because I live here," she said. He tried to assimilate the information, but could not. Perceiving his difficulty, the girl went on, "My parents indentured themselves to the Great Starway Cartel and were assigned to the rubber plantations of Dubhe 4. They died of yellow-water dysentery before their indenture ran out, and in accordance with Interstellar Law I was auctioned off along with the rest of their possessions. Eldoria bought me." Five years as a roving psycheye had hardened Blake to commercial colonization practices; nevertheless, he found the present example of man's inhumanity to man sickening. "How old are you?" Blake asked. "Fourteen." "And what are you going to be when you grow up?" "Probably I shall be a psychiatrist. Eldoria is sending me to the mission school now, and afterward she is going to put me through an institute of higher learning. And when I come of age, she is going to give me my freedom." "I see," Blake said. He indicated the book on her lap. "Homework?" She shook her head. "In addition to my courses at the mission school, I am studying the humanities." "Xenophon," Blake said. "And I suppose Plato too." "And Homer and Virgil and Aeschylus and Euripides and all the rest of them. When I grow up I shall be a most well-educated person." "I'm sure you will be," Blake said, looking at the arras. "My name is Deirdre." "Nathan," Blake said. "Nathan Blake." "Eldoria will be arriving soon. I must go and prepare her dais." * * * * * She got up, parted the arras, and slipped into the next room. Shame flamed in Blake's cheeks, and for a moment he considered leaving; then he remembered Eldoria's dance, and he went right on sitting where he was. Presently the girl returned, and not long afterward the cloying scent of native incense crept beneath the arras and permeated the anteroom. She sat sideways on the mat this time, and he caught her face in profile. There was a suggestion of saintliness in the line of the nose and chin, a suggestion made all the more poignant by the slender column of the neck. He shifted uncomfortably on the guest mat. She had taken up the _Anabasis_ again, and silence was pounding silent fists upon the walls.