"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.

He was relieved when Eldoria finally arrived. She ushered him into the next room immediately. It was slightly larger than the anteroom, and much more richly appointed. A thick carpet the color of Martian waterways lay upon the floor, contrasting pleasantly with the golden tapestries that adorned all four walls. The sleeping dais was oval and took up nearly half the floor space. It was strewn with scarlet cushions.

Blake sat down upon it. Nervously he watched Eldoria slip out of her white street robe, his eyes moving back and forth from her smooth dark skin to the arras. The incense thickened around him.

She noticed the back-and-forth movement of his eyes. "You need not fear the little one," she said, laying her hand upon his knee. "She will not enter."

"It's not that so much," Blake said.

"What?" The warm bronze shoulder was touching his....

He rose up once in the night, thinking to find his hotel bed. His next awakening was in the grayness of dawn, and he got up and dressed and moved silently to the doorway. The girl slept just 

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