"You did? If I had known—"
"Keep quiet and let me finish. You told them that I was your woman. You probably added that the whole ridiculous insanity was recent enough to be celebrated right here in their own village. Naturally that did it. Whisper the words 'nuptial ceremony' to a primitive and you've transferred to him an inward glow that makes him your friend forever.
"If he's old he remembers what it meant when it happened to him. If he's young there's the rapture of anticipation. Besides, primitives like display and drama, human giggling and embarrassment just as much as you do. You of Earth still throw rice, you know. We have passed beyond such foolishness, but there are times—"
She looked at me and giggled. It was the cruelest thing she could have done because, despite the giggle, there was a cold mockery in her stare that castigated my Earthborn heritage and made me feel ridiculous.
It was then that she really threw the book at me. "Instead of discussing the whole matter as an anthropological problem that could only have been solved by analyzing it in a calmly scientific and detached way you acted as if you thought me capable of making an embarrassing situation out of it."
She stood up abruptly, removing the binding circlet from her hair, and shaking her head until the freed tresses descended in a tumbled red-gold mass to her shoulders.
"Prudishness is both barbaric and childish," she said. "It has nothing to do with modesty and reserve, which are admirable when a man and a woman do not know one another well enough to feel at ease in an atmosphere of mutual respect and admiration."
There was a heavy silence for an instant. Then very calmly and deliberately she took off her weather jacket, folded it, and laid it on the floor at her feet.
"It will do for a pillow," she said. "I hate sleeping without a support for my head."
I stared automatically at her bare shoulders, the way I might have stared if a blinding vision of paradise had appeared to me between sleeping and waking and vanished in a flash.