"There are other factors like how well the fabrics hold up to the kinds of wear and tear they'll be subject to, or how nice they look to prevailing aesthetics. And how well they - communicate things about what kind of person you are to be wearing those clothes. But if there's some relatively narrow sort of fabric you don't like or style that pinches you, you can certainly tell the seamstress and she can work around that."

Having a direct comparison on answer quality like this does make her more inclined to believe him about the Duality.  (Though people who explain things well can still be wrong, she should keep in mind.)  Nod.

What is this book about? 

She taps Tissman's.

"It's about some of the questions people have about Dualism like why angels don't show up more often, what makes good things good and bad things bad and how you could tell about a new thing that nobody'd assessed before, how one could be sure that the church structure hasn't been corrupted somehow, it's been a couple years since I read it so I don't remember for sure what else is in there."

What does it mean for a book to be the thing you said that means I shouldn't read it all at once?

"Dense? That means that the ideas come pretty thick and fast, you might want to spend a while thinking about each one before moving on to another paragraph."

What a beautiful thing for ideas to be able to do.

(Even if they might be wrong ones.)

"Yeah."

Should I start this before I go am taken to the Dualism place tomorrow, or is it fine to wait until after?

"There's no rush, and I don't know which order will be easier to make sense of."

Today has already been a lot of new things.  I may wait.

Nod.

She kind of wants to keep him around for a while longer, even though there's the lingering upset about his mistake or perhaps because of that, and it seemed like he was going to go if she ran out of questions.  But she doesn't actually have endless questions.

......Well, there is one thing.  It might hurt her chances of getting what she wants but it might make her seem like she's level-headedly considering all options.  Also she really wants to touch him really wants to touch anyone, and especially him, but backup plans where she can touch someone else are better than backup plans where she has to move to another country and meet all new people and evaluate all of them and have all of them evaluate her.

Is there any chance, if I should not marry you, that I should marry Kerem?

"...I don't think so, no, he doesn't want to get married."

Why not?

This might be important insight into the way humans do marriage.

"Personal reasons, it wouldn't be right for me to go on about it."

Does anyone want to not marry for impersonal reasons?

"Well, perhaps not, but in this case I meant personal in the sense of private."

Oh that's not what she meant.

If there is anyone known who did not get married for reasons which are not private, I want to talk to them so I will know more about human marriage.

"Huh. Well, there's nuns."

"I think most people who don't get married either just never find someone they want to marry, or have private reasons, or are nuns."

Huh.

I think this is not true of sea people who are not my family.

"Huh. Why do sea people wind up not marrying when they don't?"

I don't know why so many humans do.

"People want heirs and - intimacy and stability."