Doreen Williamson is a quiet, shy librarian on Earth. As many other young women she is distrustful of her attractions, frightened of men, introverted in manner and sexually inhibited. She lives in a quiet, lonely, dissatisfying, sheltered, frustrated desperation, distant from her true self, her nature denied, her only friends books and her secret thoughts. In the realization and enactment of a profound fantasy, after acute self-conflict, she dares to study dancing, a form of dance in which she is at last free to move her body as a female, a form of dance in which she may revel in her beauty and womanhood, a form of dance historically commanded by masters of selected, suitable slaves, belly dance. Thusly may she fantasize her longed-for desirability. This is, of course, her delicious, shameful secret, one which must be concealed from all, one which must be forever carefully guarded. Unbeknownst to herself, however, she has independently come to the attention of skilled assessors of women, of Gorean slavers. While secretly practicing in the library after hours she is surprised by three men. She must then dance, for the first time, before men. For the first, time, too, she discovers her own desirability, and that she is such as may be well bid upon. She will be taken to the beautiful, perilous world of Gor, there, in a collar, to learn her womanhood, and there, at last, to beautifully and profoundly find and fulfill herself.