Her flight had been a brave act. I admired her, but it was an act not without its consequences. She had gambled; she had lost. In an alcove, after I had used her, she had begged me to buy her, to free her. It was a slave’s act, like that of Talena. I left her slave in the paga tavern. Before I had left, I had informed her master, Sarpedon of Lydius, that, as he did not know, she was an exquisitely trained pleasure slave, and a most stimulating performer of slave dances. I had not returned that night to see her dance in the sand to please her customers. I had matters of business to attend to. She had not honored my will. She was only a female. She had cost me a tarn.

She had told me that I had become harder, more Gorean. I wondered if it were true or not. A true Gorean, I speculated, would not have left her in the paga tavern. A true Gorean, I speculated, would have purchased her, and brought her back, to put her with his other women, a delicious new slave fopr his house. I smiled to myself. The girl, Elizabeth Cardwell, once a secretary in New York, was one of the most delicious weches I had ever seen in slave silk, Her thigh bore the brand of the four bosk horns.

No. I had not treated her as would have a true Gorean. I had not brought her back in my collar, to serve my pleasures.

And, too, I knew that I had, in my fevered delirium attendant on my wounds, when I lay in the stern castle of the Tesephone, cried out her name.

This had shamed me, and was weakness. Though I was half motionless, though I could not close the fingers of my left hand, I resolved that I must burn from myself the vestiges of weakness. Therewas still much in me that was of Earth, much shallowness, much compromise, much weakness. I was not yet in my will truly Gorean.

I wondered how to live, “ Do not ask how to live, but, instead, proceed to do so.”

I wondered, too, on the nature ofmy affliction.