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“Oh, I’ve danced all right. Twice a week all through my time at the Orphanage.”

“Therapeutic dancing?”

“That’s what they called it.”

“But, you see, that’s quite different from Art.”

“Why?”

“Oh,” she said with a sudden full intimacy, with fondness. “Oh what a lot you don’t know.”

The dancer’s name was Clara.

III

Courtship was free and easy in this epoch but Miles was Clara’s first lover. The strenuous exercises of her training, the austere standards of the corps-de-ballet and her devotion to her art had kept her body and soul unencumbered.

For Miles, child of the State, Sex had been part of the curriculum at every stage of his education; first in diagrams, then in demonstrations, then in application, he had mastered all the antics of procreation. Love was a word seldom used except by politicians and by them only in moments of pure fatuity. Nothing that he had been taught prepared him for Clara.

Once in drama, always in drama. Clara now spent her days mending ballet shoes and helping neophytes on the wall bars. She had a cubicle in a Nissen hut and it was there that she and Miles spent most of their evenings. It was unlike anyone else’s quarters in Satellite City.

Two little paintings hung on the walls, unlike any paintings Miles had seen before, unlike anything approved by the Ministry of Art. One represented a goddess of antiquity, naked and rosy, fondling a peacock on a bank of flowers; the other a vast, tree-fringed lake and a party in spreading silken clothes embarking in a pleasure boat under a broken arch. The gilt frames were much chipped but what remained of them was elaborately foliated.

“They’re French,” said Clara. “More than two hundred years old. My mother left them to me.”

All her possessions had come from her mother, nearly enough of them to furnish the little room—a looking glass framed in porcelain flowers, a gilt, irregular clock. She and Miles drank their sad, officially compounded coffee out of brilliant, riveted cups.

“It reminds me of prison,” said Miles when he was first admitted there.

It was the highest praise he knew.

On the first evening among this delicate bric-a-brac his lips found the bare twin spaces of her chin.

“I knew it would be a mistake to let the beastly doctor poison me,” said Clara complacently.

Full summer came. Another moon waxed over these rare lovers. Once they sought coolness and secrecy among the high cow-parsley and willow-herb of the waste building sites. Clara’s beard was all silvered like a patriarch’s in the midnight radiance.

“On such a night as this,” said Miles, supine, gazing into the face of the moon, “on such a night as this I burned an Air Force Station and half its occupants.”

Clara sat up and began lazily smoothing her whiskers, then more vigorously tugged the comb through the thicker, tangled growth of her head, dragging it from her forehead; re-ordered the clothing which their embraces had loosed. She was full of womanly content and ready to go home. But Miles, all male, post coitum tristis, was struck by a chill sense of loss. No demonstration or exercise had prepared him for this strange new experience of the sudden loneliness that follows requited love.

Walking home they talked casually and rather crossly.

“You never go to the ballet now.”

“No.”

“Won’t they give you seats?”

“I suppose they would.”

“Then why don’t you go?”

“I don’t think I should like it. I see them often rehearsing. I don’t like it.”

“But you lived for it.”

“Other interests now.”

“Me?”

“Of course.”

“You love me more than the ballet?”

“I am very happy.”

“Happier than if you were dancing?”

“I can’t tell, can I? You’re all I’ve got now.”

“But if you could change?”

“I can’t.”

“If?”

“There’s no ‘if.’”

“Damn.”

“Don’t fret, darling. It’s only the moon.”

And they parted in silence.

November came, a season of strikes; leisure for Miles, unsought and unvalued; lonely periods when the ballet school worked on and the death house stood cold and empty.

Clara began to complain of ill health. She was growing stout.

“Just contentment,