Page 64 - BraveNewWorld

64 IDPH

“I know you don’t. And that’s why we went to bed together yesterday-like
infants-instead of being adults and waiting.”

“But it was fun,” Lenina insisted. “Wasn’t it?”
“Oh, the greatest fun,” he answered, but in a voice so mournful, with an ex-
pression so profoundly miserable, that Lenina felt all her triumph suddenly
evaporate. Perhaps he had found her too plump, after all.
“I told you so,” was all that Fanny said, when Lenina came and made her con-
fidences. “It’s the alcohol they put in his surrogate.”
“All the same,” Lenina insisted. “I do like him. He has such awfully nice hands.
And the way he moves his shoulders-that’s very attractive.” She sighed. “But I
wish he weren’t so odd.”

§ 2

HALTING for a moment outside the door of the Director’s room, Bernard drew
a deep breath and squared his shoulders, bracing himself to meet the dislike and
disapproval which he was certain of finding within. He knocked and entered.
“A permit for you to initial, Director,” he said as airily as possible, and laid the
paper on the writing-table.
The Director glanced at him sourly. But the stamp of the World Controller’s
Office was at the head of the paper and the signature of Mustapha Mond, bold
and black, across the bottom. Everything was perfectly in order. The director
had no choice. He pencilled his initials-two small pale letters abject at the feet of
Mustapha Mond-and was about to return the paper without a word of comment
or genial Ford-speed, when his eye was caught by something written in the
body of the permit.
“For the New Mexican Reservation?” he said, and his tone, the face he lifted to
Bernard, expressed a kind of agitated astonishment.
Surprised by his surprise, Bernard nodded. There was a silence.
The Director leaned back in his chair, frowning. “How long ago was it?” he
said, speaking more to himself than to Bernard. “Twenty years, I suppose. Ne-
arer twenty-five. I must have been your age .” He sighed and shook his head.

Bernard felt extremely uncomfortable. A man so conventional, so scrupulously
correct as the Director-and to commit so gross a solecism! lt made him want
to hide his face, to run out of the room. Not that he himself saw anything
intrinsically objectionable in people talking about the remote past; that was one
of those hypnopædic prejudices he had (so he imagined) completely got rid

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