"The trouble with these people, Danley," said Edway Tarnhorst, "is that they have no respect whatever for human dignity. They have a tendency to overlook the basic rights of the individual."
"They're certainly—different," Peter Danley said.
Tarnhorst juggled himself up and down on the easy-chair in which he was seated, as though he could hardly believe that he had weight again. He hated low gee. It made him feel awkward and undignified. The only thing that reminded him that this was not "real" gravity was the faint, but all-pervasive hum of the huge engines that drove the big centrifuge. The rooms had cost more, but they were well worth it, as far as Tarnhorst was concerned.
"How do you mean, 'different'?" he asked almost absently, settling himself comfortably into the cushions.
"I don't know exactly. There's a hardness, a toughness—I can't quite put my finger on it, but it's in the way they act, the way they talk."
"Surely you'd noticed that before?" Tarnhorst asked in mild surprise. "You've met these Belt men on Luna."
"And their women," Danley said with a nod. "But the impact is somewhat more pronounced on their own home ground—seeing them en masse."
"Their women!" Tarnhorst said, caught by the phrase. "Fah! Bright-colored birds! Giggling children! And no more morals than a common house-cat!"
"Oh, they're not as bad as all that," Danley objected. "Their clothing is a little bright, I'll admit, and they laugh and kid around a lot, but I wouldn't say that their morals were any worse than those of a girl from New York or London."