He watched with folded arms, considering how he would start. _My dear Mrs. Deshazaway._ Too formal. They'd be looking out at the romantic garden; time to be a bit forward. _My very dear Mrs. Deshazaway._ No. Contrived. How about a simple, _Dear Mrs. Deshazaway_. That might be it. _I was wondering, seeing as how it's so late, if you wouldn't rather stay over instead of going home...._ Preoccupied, he hadn't noticed the winds building up, didn't hear the shaking and rattling of the pipes. There were attic pipes connected to wall pipes and wall pipes connected to cellar pipes, and they made one gigantic skeleton that began to rattle its bones and dance as high-pressure air from the dome blower rushed in, slowly opening the Studebaker valve wider and wider.... The neon roses thrashed about, extinguishing each other. The red sun shot off a mass of sparks and then quickly sank out of sight. The moon fell on the garden and rolled ponderously along, crooning _When the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day_. The shaking house finally woke him up. He scrambled upstairs to the Studebaker wheel and shut it off. At the window again, he sighed. Repairs were in order. And it wasn't the first time the winds got out of line. Why didn't she marry him and save all this bother? He shut it all down and went out the front door, wondering about the rhyme of the months, about stately August and eccentric February and romantic April. April. Its days were thirty and it followed September. _And all the rest have thirty-one._ What a strange people, the ancients! He still didn't see the orange car parked down the street. * * * * * "Men are too perishable," Mrs. Deshazaway said over dinner. "For all practical purposes I'm never going to marry again. All my husbands die." "Would you pass the beets, please?" Humphrey Fownes said. She handed him a platter of steaming red beets. "And don't look at me that way," she said. "I'm _not_ going to marry you and if you want reasons I'll give you four of them. Andrew. Curt. Norman. And Alphonse." The widow was a passionate woman. She did everything passionately--talking, cooking, dressing. Her beets were passionately red. Her clothes rustled and her high heels clicked and her jewelry tinkled. She was possessed by an uncontrollable dynamism. Fownes had never known anyone like her. "You forgot to put salt on the potatoes," she said passionately, then went on as calmly as it was possible for her to be, to explain why she couldn't marry him. "Do you have any idea what people are saying? They're all saying I'm a cannibal! I rob my husbands of their life force and when they're empty I carry their bodies outside on my way to the justice of the peace." "As long as there are people," he said philosophically, "there'll be talk."