Jane is really great.  Cyllene would not have been at all afraid if something that size made an attacky noise at her back when she was bigger and sharper and had tougher skin, but she thinks she would be now.  It doesn't really illuminate what humans like about these creatures, though.

Jane eventually comes back with an armful of gray cat which is tolerating this.

Lap?  Lap.

Well, it is bigger, which means more pet per pet, which is nice.  And she feels less afraid that she's going to do something wrong and break it, and it's less needly...

It accepts petting for about thirty seconds and then gets up and leaps out of her wheelbarrow.

"The ones that are actually pets are friendlier," says Jane. "These are here to eat mice and rats."

Oh, nod.  That does make more sense.

Back to Cyllene's room to change out of the church dress and into something else for breakfast.

Oh good; she's still pretty tired and maybe food will perk her up.  Is it happening in her room or with everyone else?

Yes, someone else brought in a breakfast. It's yogurt and fruit and porridge.

That's fine.  Again better than anything she had as a sea person and definitely less off-putting than the weird sticky thing from last night.

And then bath??  Bath that she does not have to ask for?

Indeed bath!

Yesssssssssssss.

She's going to take a little doze in here.

"- miss! Miss you need to stay awake in the bath."

- bwuh?

"I'm not sure I'm strong enough to pull you up if you slip under the water and you could drown that way, miss, please stay awake."

That seems maybe fake but she doesn't want to drown.  ...But it's coooozy.  She hauls herself up and shuffles around until something counts as enough of a step to zap her, and - yep, no risk of falling asleep now - sits back down. 

Bath resumes.

A bath is a good way to recover from leg pain but the leg pain kind of ruins the bath for bath's sake.

When she's back in her room she'll start on a little bit of Tissman's.

There are good things and bad things! Are there any things that are neither good nor bad? Tissman thinks there might be some things that are neither good nor bad and justifies this abstrusely for pages upon pages.

Does he list any things that are specifically good or bad or neither and if so do those mostly accord with Cyllene's intuitions?

Example things that might be neither good nor bad include:

- tools in general (weapons in particular), since they could be used for good or evil ends, though there is a digression into whether tool quality enters into this evaluation at all;
- the ocean (it has fish in it, and is useful for traveling on, but also it's dangerous and undrinkable)
- sleep (it seems like a huge waste of time but people sure do want it a lot when they want it)

...Those mostly sound like things that are both good and bad rather than neither??

He does cover this! Things that serve no good purpose at all are bad (they take up space that could be filled by something good). So the question he's interested in is what the underlying fundamental dualistic nature of things that serve some good purpose but also some bad purpose might be.

It's going to be really inconvenient if any of this is actually true but also if it's not she still has to understand it??  This sucks.

She stares at the words with eyebrows scrunched until she hits a topic change.  She's pretty sure her language blessing is doing more work than it usually does in forcing the meaning of what's being said into her head.  Thank you, her uncle, for trusting her that it was the right call for her.

And then she's just going to sit and stare into space for a minute.

Jane, have you read this?

"Oh, no miss."