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"You speak as if it were done for the convenience of the consumer not the pride of the producer," I suggested. "It's both," said Somel. "We have pride enough in our work." "Then why not in your children?" urged Jeff. "But we have! We're magnificently proud of them," she insisted. "Then why not sign 'em?" said Terry triumphantly. Moadine turned to him with her slightly quizzical smile.
They were not audiences of girls, either. It was some time before we were allowed to meet the young women. "Do you mind telling what you intend to do with us?" Terry burst forth one day, facing the calm and friendly Moadine with that funny half-blustering air of his.
But we could not get out, and we were being educated swiftly. Our special tutors rose rapidly in our esteem. They seemed of rather finer quality than the guards, though all were on terms of easy friendliness. Mine was named Somel, Jeff's Zava, and Terry's Moadine. We tried to generalize from the names, those of the guards, and of our three girls, but got nowhere.
"We have systems of law that go back thousands and thousands of years just as you do, no doubt," he finished politely. "Oh no," Moadine told him. "We have no laws over a hundred years old, and most of them are under twenty. In a few weeks more," she continued, "we are going to have the pleasure of showing you over our little land and explaining everything you care to know about.
I had learned to see these things very differently since living with Ellador; and as for Jeff, he was so thoroughly Herlandized that he wasn't fair to Terry, who fretted sharply in his new restraint. Moadine, grave and strong, as sadly patient as a mother with a degenerate child, kept steady watch on him, with enough other women close at hand to prevent an outbreak.
"Don't you people have but one name?" he asked one day, after we had been introduced to a whole group of them, all with pleasant, few-syllabled strange names, like the ones we knew. "Oh yes," Moadine told him. "A good many of us have another, as we get on in life a descriptive one. That is the name we earn. Sometimes even that is changed, or added to, in an unusually rich life.
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