She came nearer. She leaned gently against my shoulder; we became one. Something streamed from her into me. I felt, I knew, it _should_ be so. Every fibre of my nervous system told me this, every hair on my head, every painfully sweet heartbeat. And what a joy it was to submit to what _should_ be. A fragment of iron-ore probably feels the same joy of submission to precise, inevitable law, when it clings to a loadstone. The same joy is in a stone which thrown aloft, hesitates a little at the height of its flight and then rushes down to the ground. It is the same with a man when in his final convulsion he takes a last deep breath and dies. I remember I smiled vaguely and said for no reason at all, "Fog ... very." "Thou lovest fog, dost thou?" This ancient, long-forgotten _thou_--the thou of a master to his slave--penetrated me slowly, sharply.... Yes, I was a slave.... This too was inevitable, was good. "Yes, good ..." I said aloud to myself, and then to her, "I hate fog. I am afraid of fog." "Then you love it. For if you fear it because it is stronger than you, hate it because you fear it, you love it. For you cannot subject it to yourself. One loves only the things one cannot conquer." "Yes, that is so. That is why ... that is precisely why I...." We were walking--as one. Somewhere beyond the fog the sun was singing in a faint tone, gradually swelling, filling the air with tension and with pearl and gold and rose and red.... The whole world seemed to be one unembraceable woman, and we who were in her body were not yet born; we were ripening in joy. It was clear to me, absolutely clear, that everything existed only for me: the sun, the fog, the gold--for me. I did not ask where we were going; what did it matter? It was pleasure to walk, to ripen, to become stronger and more tense.... "Here ..." I-330 stopped at a door. "It so happens that today there is some one on duty who ... I told you about him in the Ancient House." Carefully guarding the forces ripening within me, I read the sign: "Medical Bureau." Automatically only I understood. ... A glass room, filled with golden fog; shelves of glass, colored bottles, jars, electric wires, bluish sparks in tubes; and a male Number--a very thinly flattened man. He might have been cut out of a sheet of paper. Wherever he was, whichever way he turned, he showed only a profile, a sharply pointed, glittering blade of a nose and lips like scissors.