‘Well, he won’t be alone when he’s with me. And anyhow, why are people so beastly to him? I think he’s rather sweet.’ She smiled to herself; how absurdly shy he had been! Frightened almost—as though she were a World Controller and he a Gamma-Minus machine minder.

‘Consider your own lives,’ said Mustapha Mond. ‘Has any of you ever encountered an insurmountable obstacle?’

The question was answered by a negative silence.

‘Has any of you been compelled to live through a long time-interval between the consciousness of a desire and its fulfilment?’

‘Well,’ began one of the boys, and hesitated.

‘Speak up,’ said the D.H.C. ‘Don’t keep his fordship waiting.’

‘I once had to wait nearly four weeks before a girl I wanted would let me have her.’

‘And you felt a strong emotion in consequence?’

‘Horrible!’

‘Horrible; precisely,’ said the Controller. ‘Our ancestors were so stupid and short-sighted that when the first reformers came along and offered to deliver them from those horrible emotions, they wouldn’t have anything to do with them.’

‘Talking about her as though she were a bit of meat.’ Bernard ground his teeth. ‘Have her here, have her there. Like mutton. Degrading her to so much mutton. She said she’d think it over, she said she’d give me an answer this week. Oh, Ford, Ford, Ford.’ He would have liked to go up to them and hit them in the face—hard, again and again.

‘Yes, I really do advise you to try her,’ Henry Foster was saying.

‘Take Ectogenesis. Pfitzner and Kawaguchi had got the whole technique worked out. But would the Governments look at it? No. There was something called Christianity. Women were forced to go on being viviparous.’

‘He’s so ugly!’ said Fanny.

‘But I rather like his looks.’

‘And then so small.’ Fanny made a grimace; smallness was so horribly and typically low-caste.

‘I think that’s rather sweet,’ said Lenina. ‘One feels one would like to pet him. You know. Like a cat.’

Fanny was shocked. ‘They say somebody made a mistake when he was still in the bottle—thought he was a Gamma and put alcohol into his blood-surrogate. That’s why he’s so stunted.’

‘What nonsense!’ Lenina was indignant.

‘Sleep teaching was actually prohibited in England. There was something called liberalism. Parliament, if you know what that was, passed a law against it. The records survive. Speeches about liberty of the subject. Liberty to be inefficient and miserable. Freedom to be a round peg in a square hole.’

‘But, my dear chap, you’re welcome, I assure you. You’re welcome.’ Henry Foster patted the Assistant Predestinator on the shoulder. ‘Every one belongs to every one else, after all.’