“Now, snuggling down in those goose feathers with you would be more like it.” Josef joked because he thought it was the time for it, but he was growing tired.

“I don’t think I can do it,” Lydia said.

“Do what?” Seven asked, innocently.

“You know what. Be born again. Why can’t people just be born at ten? Just arrive somehow, full-blown?”

“You better get out of here, though,” Bianka said. “If my mother catches you in here now, she’ll start yelling and you’ll yell back. You aren’t supposed to be in here until it’s all over.”

“If it’s ever over,” Josef exclaimed. “Do you feel the baby now? Is it kicking or anything?”

“I don’t now, but I did. Oh God, did I! Now the baby’s sleeping, I think.”

“Maybe it will just go away,” Josef muttered.

“Some father he’ll make,” Lydia said. “We make all these agreements when he’s in the dream state, but he sure doesn’t remember them when he’s awake. And not all the time when he’s dreaming, either.”

Just then dawn streaked across the sky. A gray light filled the room. Sound came from downstairs. A cock crowed. “You’d better get back to the cot,” Bianka cried.

Lydia disconsolately looked at Seven, then at the frost-coated window and beyond to the snowy hills. The activity downstairs quickened, and through the window Lydia saw Bianka’s brother, Jonathan Hosentauf, go out to the barn, rubbing his glowed hands together, puffing out his cheeks. Smoke was coming from one of the chimneys, and Lydia suddenly realized that now she was looking at the entire scene from above, and that the scene was withdrawing, or she was withdrawing from it.

In the next second she found herself standing back in the long corridor with her face pressed to the gigantic sparkling window, the marble floors beneath her feet and the entire snowy scene so distant a view from the window that she could hardly make it out at all.

She looked around, almost peevishly. For one thing, Oversoul Seven was gone, which made her angry, and for another she felt even more indecisive than she had before. Did she really want to be reborn or not? She didn’t know, and yet she wasn’t pleased with the present situation either. Just thinking about it made her angrier, and at the same time she suddenly felt vehemently, wildly, independent. She was tired of going off willy-nilly. She wanted a place of her own, a point of familiarity she could always count on and return to, a place where even Oversoul Seven would be expected to knock first before entering.

She wanted—