He smiles sadly at her.

She is tempted into one more pet, and then she goes and sits on her chair again.

Miles sighs and looks at his hands and sits up, lest he fall asleep again.

"And what did Mark think of that?"

"He can see why you like braiding."

"I wonder if he can. ...I suspect so."

"Can - see why you like it? Is it very complicated?"

"Reasonably complicated, yes."

"Well, now I want to know."

"Well... there's the 'your hair is soft and nice to play with' aspect, and there's the 'spending time with my wife' aspect, and there's the challenge aspect, and there's the accomplishment aspect."

"The challenge and the accomplishment are separate?"

"Yes. They're - complementary, but differently enjoyable."

"Mm." She sighs. "I imagine he and his nine feet of stolen hair didn't exactly bond, though."

"But I suspect he would've been able to extrapolate that part, at least to some degree."

"Probably. Although given how startling he finds the concept of - friendly physical contact - I'm not sure it was a significant degree."

"The concept, or the practice, though?"

"I was getting at something like - the first-person apprehension of the phenomenon more than either of those per se."

"Hmm." He falls into a contemplative silence.

Braid braid braid. She's trying to give her hands something to do, not get a pretty result. She drops it, untied, when she reaches the ends of her hair and shuts her eyes. "I am so bored."

"Me too. We could name some more little Vorkosigans to pass the time," he suggests.

"Right. What's Ninon's middle name, hm?"

"Hmm, girl's names... Axia, Akilina, Arisha, Olya, Rada, Sura, Rosal, Petya, Teka, Inna, Zina, Tsila, Varya, Coralie, Tamsin, Sandrine, Soraya, Luva, Yana, Esfir, Kira, Davina... I'm not filtering these by any kind of aesthetic preference, I'm just listing everything that springs to mind. And I keep gravitating back to two-syllable probably-Russian-derived names ending in A. There are rather a lot of them, it turns out."