Lenina looked down through the window in the floor between her feet.
They were flying over the six kilometre zone of park-land that separated Central London from its first ring of satellite suburbs.
The green was maggoty with fore-shortened life.
Forests of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy towers gleamed between the trees.
Near Shepherd's Bush two thousand Beta-Minus mixed doubles were playing Riemann-surface tennis.
A double row of Escalator Fives Courts lined the main road from Notting Hill to Willesden.
In the Ealing stadium a Delta gymnastic display and community sing was in progress.
"What a hideous colour khaki is," remarked Lenina, voicing the hyp-nopaedic prejudices of her caste.
The buildings of the Hounslow Feely Studio covered seven and a half hectares.
Near them a black and khaki army of labourers was busy re-vitrifying the surface of the Great West Road.
One of the huge travelling crucibles was being tapped as they flew over.
The molten stone poured out in a stream of dazzling incandescence across the road, the asbestos rollers came and went; at the tail of an insulated watering cart the steam rose in white clouds.
At Brentford the Television Corporation's factory was like a small town.
"They must be changing the shift," said Lenina.
Like aphides and ants, the leaf-green Gamma girls, the black Semi-Morons swarmed round the entrances, or stood in queues to take their places in the monorail tram-cars.
Mulberry-coloured Beta-Minuses came and went among the crowd.
The roof of the main building was alive with the alighting and departure of helicopters.
"My word," said Lenina, "I'm glad I'm not a Gamma."
Ten minutes later they were at Stoke Poges and had started their first round of Obstacle Golf.
§2 WITH eyes for the most part downcast and, if ever they lighted on a fellow creature, at once and furtively averted, Bernard hastened across the roof.
He was like a man pursued, but pursued by enemies he does not wish to see, lest they should seem more hostile even than he had supposed, and he himself be made to feel guiltier and even more helplessly alone.
"That horrible Benito Hoover!"
And yet the man had meant well enough.
Which only made it, in a way, much worse.
Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.
Even Lenina was making him suffer.
He remembered those weeks of timid indecision, during which he had looked and longed and despaired of ever having the courage to ask her.
Dared he face the risk of being humiliated by a contemptuous refusal?
But if she were to say yes, what rapture!
Well, now she had said it and he was still wretched-wretched that she should have thought it such a perfect afternoon for Obstacle Golf, that she should have trotted away to join Henry Foster, that she should have found him funny for not wanting to talk of their most private affairs in public.
Wretched, in a word, because she had behaved as any healthy and virtuous English girl ought to behave and not in some other, abnormal, extraordinary way.
He opened the door of his lock-up and called to a lounging couple of Delta-Minus attendants to come and push his machine out on to the roof.
The hangars were staffed by a single Bokanovsky Group, and the men were twins, identically small, black and hideous.
Bernard gave his orders in the sharp, rather arrogant and even offensive tone of one who does not feel himself too secure in his superiority.
To have dealings with members of the lower castes was always, for Bernard, a most distressing experience.
For whatever the cause (and the current gossip about the alcohol in his blood-surrogate may very likely-for accidents will happen-have been true) Bernard's physique as hardly better than that of the average Gamma.
He stood eight centimetres short of the standard Alpha height and was slender in proportion.
Contact with members of he lower castes always reminded him painfully of this physical inadequacy.
"I am I, and wish I wasn't"; his self- consciousness was acute and stressing.
Each time he found himself looking on the level, instead of downward, into a Delta's face, he felt humiliated.
Would the creature treat him with the respect due to his caste?
The question haunted him.
Not without reason.
For Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons had been to some extent conditioned to associate corporeal mass with social superiority.
Indeed, a faint hypnopaedic prejudice in favour of size was universal.
Hence the laughter of the women to whom he made proposals, the practical joking of his equals among the men.
The mockery made him feel an outsider; and feeling an outsider he behaved like one, which increased the prejudice against him and intensified the contempt and hostility aroused by his physical defects.
Which in turn increased his sense of being alien and alone.
A chronic fear of being slighted made him avoid his equals, made him stand, where his inferiors were concerned, self-consciously on his dignity.
How bitterly he envied men like Henry Foster and Benito Hoover!