"...okay."

"It's really very boring work, keeping a court running. I hated it when I have to do it. More than half of it is scheduling."

"I've never run a court. And if I have it would have been different."

"Oh, how's that?"

"We're very different from you all where I'm from."

"In ways other than the language?"

"Yes."

"Well, go on," he says impatiently.

"For one thing we've all got wings."

"I guess that'd enable communications with more distant peoples and function effectively like a higher population? There are areas more populated than this one and they're pretty different culturally."

"Our population is actually way less dense than yours and also less dense-feeling even accounting for people being able to fly."

"Huh."

"Most kinds aren't breeders, though I don't know if that suffices to explain it."

"Our population used to be less dense, but it increases over time. Yours will probably also do that, even if most people don't have children, as long as deaths are rarer than children."

"They are."

"Then someday you'll have so many people that the deaths match the births. I think the island where fairies started is like that but most places aren't. This continent isn't."

"There's a lot of room to spread out, though, in all directions."

"Is your world round? Ours is, so it's got limited surface area."

"No, it is not."

"Then maybe it'll work out differently for you."

"Maybe. I don't know if the rate of appearances of new people is uniform through the whole world."

" - well, I'd expect it to be related to the existing population density in that that's who's deciding to have children."

"Some, but most kinds aren't breeding kinds."

"I don't know what that means."

"I'm a leaflet but that's just one kind, there are more. Though we all have things in common like the wings and the plain speaking. Most kinds aren't breeding kinds, though I think most individuals are. I'm not. I was never a child."