Oiie was a changed man at home. The secretive look left his face, and he did not drawl when he spoke. His family treated him with respect, but there was mutuality in the respect. Shevek had heard a good deal of Oiie’s views on women, and was surprised to see that he treated his wife with courtesy, even delicacy. “This is chivalry,” Shevek thought, having recently learned the word, but he soon decided it was something better than that. Oiie was fond of his wife and trusted her. He behaved to her and to his children very much as an Anarresti might. In fact, at home, he suddenly appeared as a simple, brotherly kind of man, a free man.

It seemed to Shevek a very small range of freedom, a very narrow family, but he felt so much at ease, so much freer himself, that he was disinclined to criticize.

In a pause after conversation, the younger boy said in his small, clear voice, “Mr. Shevek doesn’t have very good manners.”

“Why not?” Shevek asked before Oiie’s wife could reprove the child. “What did I do?”

“You didn’t say thank you.”

“For what?”

“When I passed you the dish of pickles.”

“Ini! Be quiet!”

Sadik! Don’t egoize! The tone was precisely the same.

“I thought you were sharing them with me. Were they a gift? We say thank you only for gifts, in my country. We share other things without talking about it, you see. Would you like the pickles back again?”

“No, I don’t like them,” the child said, looking up with dark, very clear eyes into Shevek’s face.

“That makes it particularly easy to share them,” Shevek said. The older boy was writhing with the suppressed desire to pinch Ini, but Ini laughed, showing his little white teeth. After a while in another pause he said in a low voice, leaning towards Shevek, “Would you like to see my otter?”

“Yes.”

“He’s in the back garden. Mother put him out because she thought he might bother you. Some grownups don’t like animals.”

“I like to see them. We have no animals in my country.”

“You don’t?” said the older boy, staring. “Father! Mr. Shevek says they don’t have any animals!”

Ini also stared. “But what do you have?”

“Other people. Fish. Worms. And holum trees.”

“What are holum trees?”

The conversation went on for half an hour. It was the first time Shevek had been asked, on Urras, to describe Anarres. The children asked the questions, but the parents listened with interest. Shevek kept out of the ethical mode with some scrupulousness; he was not there to propagandize his host’s children. He simply told them what the dust was like, what Abbenay looked like, what kind of clothes one wore, what people did when they wanted new clothes, what children did in school. This last became propaganda, despite his intentions. Ini and Aevi were entranced by his description of a curriculum that included farming, carpentry, sewage reclamation, printing, plumbing, roadmending, playwriting, and all the other occupations of the adult community, and by his admission that nobody was ever punished for anything.