the shack for some reason, for I have found no signs of them there, and they hunted through the woods like wild things and forgot what they knew. They bred you at least. Then they died while you were quite small, perhaps five or six years old, and you forgot whatever was left to forget of man's five hundred thousand years of cumulative learning. It isn't like instinct; it can all be lost like that!" He snapped his fingers in her face.He made her throw the bone away before they reached home. He suspected that some things like language, if not learned when the organism is young, might always prove difficult. He thought of stories of wolf children and of how they soon died when placed in institutions.

As she danced before him, he noticed how prettily she was filling out. The conviction that she had better have a dress and soon, hit him like an axe blow. He began to watch the trees, the sky, the ground.

He made it from one of his shirts, and she squawled with fright when he slipped it over her head. Whenever she started to take it off, he would speak sharply to her. But she had a strong will. Soon he was forced to chase her and slap her to make her obey. She would pretend to pull it off just to tease him and one day when he was burning leaves she threw it on the fire and fled.

Although he made her another and decorated it with bottle caps in the hope that since historians claimed dress began as decoration she too would see the light. It was too late to change her original dislike, even though he paraded around in it and pretended to be very proud of himself. It was war after that. She smiled knowingly when he told her bugs would bite her if she didn't wear it or that a great ship would come out of the sky and take her away. The dress was off as much as it was on.

Normally she would accept whatever he said, but not when it had to do with the dress. She didn't like it. It made her itch and sweat. It was her enemy. And when he allied with it he was too.

She was a beautiful animal when she was angry. Now he was in a haste for the sixth month to come. For as he often told her: "I've loused you up and you've loused me up enough as it is."

At sleeping time, his dreams of beautifully gowned women leaning over the piano and beckoning, bending in velvet curves to refill his glass, dancing up to him with their arms outstretched, standard spacemen's dreams, no longer gave him pleasure because he could never be sure when they disrobed in their softly lit apartments that they might not turn revealed, the nameless girl.

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