"That's true—But other girls of my age—"
"Exactly," came Mentor's dry rejoinder. "Thinking of yourself as an adult Homo sapien, you were judging yourself by false standards. As a matter of fact, you are an adolescent, not an adult. In due time you will come to love a man, and he you, with a fervor and depth which you at present cannot even dimly understand."
"But that still leaves my parents," Kathryn felt much better. "I can apparently age, of course, as easily as I can put on a hat ... but I really do love them, you know, and it will simply break mother's heart to have all her daughters turn out to be—as she thinks—spinsters."
"On that point, too, you may rest at ease. I am taking care of that. Kimball and Clarrissa both know, without knowing how they know it, that your life cycle is tremendously longer than theirs. They both know that they will not live to see their grandchildren. Be assured, daughter, that before they pass from this cycle of existence into the next—about which I know nothing—they shall know that all is to be supremely well with their line; even though, to Civilization at large, it shall apparently end with you Five."
"End with us? What do you mean?"
"You have a destiny, the nature of which your mind is not yet qualified to receive. In due time the knowledge shall be yours. Suffice it now to say that the next forty or fifty years will be but a fleeting moment in the span of life which is to be yours. But time, at the moment, presses. You are now fully recovered and we must get on with this, your last period of study with me, at the end of which you will be able to bear the fullest, closest impact of my mind as easily as you have heretofore borne full contact with your sisters'. Let us proceed with the work."
Work it was, and it went on for weeks. Kathryn took and survived those shattering treatments, one after another; emerging finally with a mind whose power and scope can no more be explained to any mind below the third level than can the general theory of relativity be explained to a chimpanzee.
"It was forced, not natural, yes," the Arisian said, gravely, as the girl was about to leave. "You are many millions of your years ahead of your natural time. You realize, however, the necessity of that forcing. You also realize that I can give you no more formal instruction. I will be with you or on call at all times; I will be of aid in crises; but in larger matters your further development is in your own hands."
Kathryn shivered. "I realize that, and it scares me clear through—especially this coming conflict, at which you hint so vaguely. I wish that you would tell me at least something about it, so that I could get ready for it!"