"QX—we'll have the tailor make you a dress or two. Some of the boys haven't been around very much, and you'd look pretty bare to them. Everything you've got on, jewelry and all, wouldn't make a Tellurian sunsuit, you know."
"Then have them hurry up the dress, please. But this isn't jewelry, it is—"
"Jet back, beautiful. I know gold, and platinum, and—"
"The metal is expensive, yes," Illona conceded. "These alone," she tapped one of the delicate shields, "cost five days of work. But base metal stains the skin blue and green and black, so what can one do? As for the beads, they are synthetics—junk. Poor girls, if they buy it themselves, do not wear jewelry, but beads, like these. Half a day's work buys the lot."
"What!" Kinnison demanded.
"Certainly. Rich girls only, or poor girls who do not work, wear real jewelry, such as ... the Aldebaranian has not the words. Let me think at you, please?"
"Sorry, nothing there that I recognize at all," Kinnison answered, after studying a succession of thought-images of multicolored, spectacular gems. "That's one to file away in the book, too, believe me. But as to that 'junk' you've got draped all over yourself—half a day's pay—what do you work at for a living, when you work?"
"I'm a dancer—like this." She leaped lightly to her feet and her left boot whizzed past her ear in a flashingly fast high kick. Then followed a series of gyrations and contortions, for which the Lensman knew no names, during which the girl seemed a practically boneless embodiment of suppleness and grace. She sat down; meticulous hairdress scarcely rumpled, not a buckle or bracelet awry, breathing hardly one count faster.
"Nice." Kinnison applauded briefly. "Hard for me to evaluate such talent as that. However, upon Tellus or any one of a thousand other planets I could point out to you, you can sell that 'junk' you're wearing for—at a rough guess—about fifty thousand days' work."