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you’re
still
going out with Henry Foster?”
    Mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters. But there were also husbands, wives, lovers. There were also monogamy and romance.
    “Though you probably don’t know what those are,” said Mustapha Mond.
    They shook their heads.
    Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness, a narrow channelling of impulse and energy.
    “But every one belongs to every one else,” he concluded, citing the hypnopædic proverb.
    The students nodded, emphatically agreeing with a statement which upwards of sixty-two thousand repetitions in the dark had made them accept, not merely as true, but as axiomatic, self-evident, utterly indisputable.
    “But after all,” Lenina was protesting, “it’s only about four months now since I’ve been having Henry.”
    “
Only
four months! I like that. And what’s more,” Fanny went on, pointing an accusing finger, “there’s been nobody else except Henry all that time. Has there?”
    Lenina blushed scarlet; but her eyes, the tone of her voice remained defiant. “No, there hasn’t been any one else,” she answered almost truculently. “And I jolly well don’t see why there should have been.”
    “Oh, she jolly well doesn’t see why there should have been,” Fanny repeated, as though to an invisible listener behind Lenina’s left shoulder. Then, with a sudden change of tone, “But seriously,” she said, “I really do think you ought to be careful. It’s such horribly bad form to go on and on like this with one man. At forty, or thirty-five, it wouldn’t be so bad. But at
your
age, Lenina! No, it really won’t do. And you know how strongly the D.H.C. objects to anything intense or long-drawn. Four months of Henry Foster, without having another man—why, he’d be furious if he knew …”
    “Think of water under pressure in a pipe.” They thought of it. “I pierce it once,” said the Controller. “What a jet!”
    He pierced it twenty times. There were twenty piddling little fountains.
    “My baby. My baby …!”
    “Mother!” The madness is infectious.
    “My love, my one and only, precious, precious …”
    Mother, monogamy, romance. High spurts the fountain; fierce and foamy the wild jet. The urge has but a single outlet. My love, my baby. No wonder these poor pre-moderns were mad and wicked and miserable. Their world didn’t allow them to take things easily, didn’t allow them to be sane, virtuous, happy. What with mothers and lovers, what with the prohibitions they were not conditioned to obey, what with the temptations and the lonely remorses, what with all the diseases and the endless isolating pain, what with the uncertainties and the poverty—they were forced to feel strongly. And feeling strongly (and strongly, what was more, in solitude, in hopelessly individual isolation), how could they be stable?
    “Of course there’s no need to give him up. Have somebody else from time to time, that’s all. He has other girls, doesn’t he?”
    Lenina admitted it.
    “Of course he does. Trust Henry Foster to be the perfect gentleman—always correct. And then there’s the Director to think of. You know what a stickler …”
    Nodding, “He patted me on the behind this afternoon,” said Lenina.
    “There, you see!” Fanny was triumphant. “That shows what
he
stands for. The strictest conventionality.”
    “Stability,” said the Controller, “stability. No civilization without social stability. No social stability without individual stability.” His voice was a trumpet. Listening they felt larger, warmer.
    The machine turns, turns and must keep on turning—for ever. It is death if it stands still. A thousand millions scrabbled the crust of the earth. The wheels began to turn. In a hundred and fifty years there were two thousand millions. Stop all the wheels. In a hundred and fifty weeks there are once more only a thousand millions; a thousand thousand thousand men and women have starved to death.
    Wheels must turn