Katie Welles Brave New World Ch. 2

“Well, they used to be viviparous.”

The roses
flamed up as though with a sudden passion from within; a new and profound
sigruficance seemed to suffuse the shining pages of the books.

Half a dozen
nurses, trousered and jacketed in the regulation white viscose-linen uniform,
their hair aseptically hidden under white caps, were engaged in setting out
bowls of roses in a long row across the floor.

All the air of the
fourteenth floor was sibilant with the categorical imperative.

Thousands of petals, ripe-blown and silkily smooth, like the cheeks of
innumerable little cherubs, but of cherubs, in that bright light, not exclusively
pink and Aryan, but also luminously Chinese, also Mexican, also apoplectic
with too much blowing of celestial trumpets, also pale as death, pale with the
posthumous whiteness of marble.

But wordless conditioning is crude and
wholesale; cannot bring home the finer distinctions, cannot inculcate the more
complex courses of behaviour.

Thousands of petals, ripe-blown and silkily smooth, like the cheeks of
innumerable little cherubs, but of cherubs, in that bright light, not exclusively
pink and Aryan, but also luminously Chinese, also Mexican, also apoplectic
with too much blowing of celestial trumpets, also pale as death, pale with the
posthumous whiteness of marble.

There was something desperate,
almost insane, about the sharp spasmodic yelps to which they now gave
utterance.