"Barbara, you could be a popular actress, you know."
"Someday I shall be. But this does not come overnight, Scyth. It takes work, you know."
"I have an idea that the flavor of the foreign often helps."
"This is true."
"Then I have a suggestion. Why not come along with us back to Marandis? You have youth and beauty and ability and also the exotic flavor. It—"
"What shall I be?" she returned quietly. "The ignorant but beautiful barbarian? A clothes horse slightly incapable of holding an intelligent conversation? This seldom works, Scyth. I've studied history a bit and I recall the case of a native girl called Pocahontas who was carried from her native surroundings into the height of the civilization for the time. She was no actress—she was exhibited like a pet monkey or a rare zoölogical specimen. She died of what they called heartbreak. I think heartbreak in this case was a combination of loneliness, of facing the realization that she could never really belong to the culture, of the futility of asking to be returned to her people. In other words Pocahontas lost the will to live. So thank you, Scyth, but I have no desire to be a chattel, or a curiosity.... Or a museum-piece."
Scyth nodded seriously. "I see your point. But I don't agree with you. In the first place you are indulging in a conversation with me. In the second place, you—"
"In the first place," said Barbara pointedly, "this conversation is being carefully kept on my level, isn't it?"
"I wouldn't say that."
"Of course not. But look, Scyth, aren't you using that menslator of yours?"