He broke in, feeling the tension rise in the child’s body, the cowering and the summoning of courage, unendurable. “She says, ‘Shevek is a traitor, Sadik is an egoizer’— You know what she says, Takver!” His eyes were blazing. Takver came forward and touched her daughter’s cheek, once, rather timidly. She said in a quiet voice, “Yes, I know,” and went and sat down on the other bed platform, facing them.

The baby, tucked away next to the wall, snored slightly. People in the next room came back from commons, a door slammed, somebody down in the square called good night and was answered from an open window. The big domicile, two hundred rooms, was astir, alive quietly all around them; as their existence entered into its existence so did its existence enter into theirs, as part of a whole. Presently Sadik slipped off her father’s knees and sat on the platform beside him, close to him. Her dark hair was rumpled and tangled, hanging around her face.

“I didn’t want to tell you, because…” Her voice sounded thin and small. “But it just keeps getting worse. They make each other meaner.”

“Then you won’t go back there,” Shevek said. He put his arm around her, but she resisted, sitting straight.

“If I go and talk to them—” said Takver.

“It’s no use. They feel as they feel.”

“But what is this we’re up against?” Takver asked with bewilderment.

Shevek did not answer. He kept his arm around Sadik, and she yielded at last, leaning her head against his arm with a weary heaviness. “There are other learning centers,” he said at last, without much certainty.

Takver stood up. She clearly could not sit still and wanted to do something, to act. But there was not much to do. “Let me braid your hair, Sadik,” she said in a subdued voice.

She brushed and braided the child’s hair; they set the screen across the room, and tucked Sadik in beside the sleeping baby. Sadik was near tears again saying good night, but within half an hour they heard by her breathing that she was asleep.

Shevek had settled down at the head of their bed platform with a notebook and the slate he used for calculating.

“I paged that manuscript today,” Takver said.

“What did it come to?”

“Forty-one pages. With the supplement.”

He nodded. Takver got up, looked over the screen at the two sleeping children, returned, and sat down on the edge of the platform.

“I knew there was something wrong. But she didn’t say anything. She never has, she’s stoical. It didn’t occur to me it was this. I thought it was just our problem, it didn’t occur to me they’d take it out on children.” She spoke softly and bitterly. “It grows, it keeps growing… Will another school be any different?”

“I don’t know. If she spends much time with us, probably not.”

“You certainly aren’t suggesting—”

“No, I’m not. I’m stating a fact, only. If we choose to give the child the intensity of individual love, we can’t spare her what comes with that, the risk of pain. Pain from us, and through us.”