For a moment, she considered her face thoughtfully – too fat. She opened her jaws half an inch behind closed lips, and caught the resultant trace of unnatural gauntness at every angle. She licked her lips with a quick touch of tongue and let them pout a bit in moist softness. Then she let her eyelids droop in a weary, worldly way– Oh, golly if only her cheeks weren’t that silly pink.
She tried putting her fingers to the outer comers of her eye and tilting the lids a bit to get that mysterious exotic languor of the women of the inner star systems, but her hands were in the way and she couldn’t see her face very well.
Then she lifted her chin, caught herself at a half-profile, and with her eyes a little strained from looking out the comer and her neck muscles faintly aching, she said, in a voice one octave below its natural pitch, “Really, father, if you think it makes a particle of difference to me what some silly old boys think you just–”
And then she remembered that she still had the transmitter open in her hand and said, drearily, “Oh, golly,” and shut it off.
The faintly violet paper with the peach margin line on the left had upon it the following:
“THE FUTURE OF SELDON’S PLAN
“Really, father, if you think it makes a particle of difference to me what some silly old boys think you just
“Oh, golly.”
She pulled the sheet out of the machine with annoyance and another clicked neatly into place.
But her face smoothed out of its vexation, nevertheless, and her wide, little mouth stretched into a self-satisfied smile. She sniffed at the paper delicately. just right. Just that proper touch of elegance and charm. And the penmanship was just the last word.
The machine had been delivered two days ago on her first adult birthday. She had said, “But father, everybody – just everybody in the class who has the slightest pretensions to being anybody has one. Nobody but some old drips would use hand machines–”
The salesman had said, “There is no other model as compact on the one hand and as adaptable on the other. It will spell and punctuate correctly according to the sense of the sentence. Naturally, it is a great aid to education since it encourages the user to employ careful enunciation and breathing in order to make sure of the correct spelling, to say nothing of demanding a proper and elegant delivery for correct punctuation.”
Even then her father had tried to get one geared for type-print as if she were some dried-up, old-maid teacher.
But when it was delivered, it was the model she wanted – obtained perhaps with a little more wail and sniffle than quite went with the adulthood of fourteen – and copy was turned out in a charming and entirely feminine handwriting, with the most beautifully graceful capitals anyone ever saw.
Even the phrase, “Oh, golly.” somehow breathed glamour when the Transcriber was done with it.
But just the same she had to get it right, so she sat up straight in her chair, placed her first draft before her in businesslike fashion, and began again, crisply and clearly; her abdomen flat, her chest lifted, and her breathing carefully controlled. She intoned, with dramatic fervor:
The Future of Seldon’s Plan.
“The Foundation’s past history is, I am sure, well-known to all of us who have had the good fortune to be educated in our planet’s efficient and well-staffed school system.
(There! That would start things off right with Miss Erlking, that mean old hag.)
That past history is largely the past history of the great Plan of Hari Seldon. The two are one. But the question in the mind of most people today is whether this Plan will continue in all its great wisdom, or whether it will be foully destroyed, or, perhaps, has been so destroyed already.
“To understand this, it may be best to pass quickly over some of the highlights of the Plan as it has been revealed to humanity thus far.
(This part was easy because she had taken Modern History the semester before.)