She rushed from the shower, clutched her robe, flung it over her shoulders like a cape and fairly flew downstairs. She ran into the kitchen and could just make out the first faint suggestion of a scorching smell. She removed the pot from the burner, assayed the damage, stirred the contents, added water, and replaced the pot with a little sigh of relief. She went upstairs slowly, still wearing her robe like a cloak over her nakedness. And strangely, she realized all at once, although she had washed the so-called happiness balm off herself thoroughly, her skin still tingled. And, now that she was growing accustomed to it, the tingling was a decidedly pleasant sensation. Decidedly. It was like a thousand thousand tiny fingers racing across her skin, racing, racing.... With a sudden wild impulse Mary-Jean flung the robe off and looked at herself in the mirror. Her knees went weak on her, so weak that she had to clutch the edge of her vanity table for support. She was beautiful. She looked again. The beauty, the delirious thought of that beauty, could wait. She was changed. Different. Changed utterly. She wasn't Mary-Jean Wilson any longer. The transformation left her breathless. There was no doubt about her new looks. She was beautiful. Her hair was not the washed-out dirty blonde it had been, but a gossamer veil of finest platinum blonde framing a lovely face, a face right out of the women's slick magazines she always dreamed over. And her body--she shivered with delight. She had always been a little shy about her body, even with Tom. There had never been any reason, not really: she had a perfectly adequate little figure and Tom always said, particularly at night, that he liked the way she was built. But now she was statuesque. She turned slowly, nude, before the mirror. She had a long curving length of calf and bold firm swelling thighs and a sweeping arc of hip below a narrow, flat waist and proudly high breasts.... * * * * * It was some kind of hallucination, she told herself. It had to be. You're Mary-Jean Wilson. You haven't changed. She moved away from the mirror uncertainly. The glorious apparition moved away, inside the mirror. She moved back. It moved back. She touched a hand to her bare throat. It touched a hand to its bare throat. Mary-Jean Wilson, she thought. Cross out Mary-Jean Wilson. I'm a new edition. I'm ... I'm ... tears welled in her eyes. There wasn't any doubt about it: she was the most beautiful woman she had ever seen, in real life, in the movies, in the slick magazines, anywhere. She had been changed utterly. Transformed. Metamorphosed. Into a stunning, radiant creature. The happiness balm? But of course. It had to be the happiness balm. Wait until Tom saw her ... held her.... Tom?