- Tristram wanders over to where a group of men and women is getting itself organized for another round of ritual sex in the fields.
- As he chats with the man in charge of organizing the pairs, Tristram learns that he (the leader) underwent surgical castration back in the city, before the shift in social thinking. The man can't understand why no one told him that "that sort of world wasn't going to go on for ever" (4.4.10).