The months went on. Once again there was nothing for me to do, only it was worse for me now because I had tasted usefulness and fame. People did come for a while with their headaches and cut fingers for me to heal, and I was happy healing them until I realized they were just coming to make me feel good. They didn't really need me. Anybody who had anything seriously wrong with him went to a psychiatrist or a machine, same as always. I healed them too quickly for them to have time to take pleasure in it. They couldn't talk for days about a three-second operation. * * * * * By and by, even the cut fingers didn't come. Maybe I hadn't been exactly gracious toward the end. Maybe the whole thing was my fault. Even the Lucy business. My mother said it was, anyhow. You see, Lucy lived quite a distance away and we couldn't call each other up because of my not being able to use the tellies. We wrote and I went to see her a few times, and then she came to meet my family. Once. It was a ghastly evening. We all sat around stiffly, my family being excessively polite to her, thinking, I knew, that this was my only chance to get myself a wife and so they'd better be nice to the girl, no matter what she was like. And seeing her with what I fancied to be their eyes, I realized that she wasn't outstandingly pretty, particularly bright, or even very talented. And what was she thinking? That she had got herself virtually engaged to a useless half-sense because he had had a brief moment of glory as a war hero? Trapped with this imbecile and his dull, stuffy family, and not being able to get out of it without being cruel? What were they _actually_ thinking? I didn't know. But _they_ did--Mother knew what everybody was thinking, right down to the last convolution of the subconscious mind and Sylvia knew what everyone else was feeling, and the others ... they knew or at least sensed part of what was going on. But I was impercipient, I couldn't tell anything, I was excluded--out in the cold--and, being unable ever really to know, was forced to draw the worst conclusions. I took Lucy home that evening. They had to trust me that far alone because it would have looked absurd for Danny or Tim to come along as chaperone, and anyway I had been there alone before, when I had gone to see her. "Lucy," I said as we stood awkwardly before her door, "I don't want you to feel, just because of what might have happened in a burst of--of patriotic fervor, that you're bound or--" "No, Kevin," she murmured, without looking at me. "I understand. I don't feel bound or--committed in any way. And you mustn't feel bound, either." "That's good." I felt a deep sense of sorrow working its way down to settle in my viscera and, if she'd had much perceptiveness, things might have been different then. But she hadn't. I took a deep breath, determined to carry my heartbreak off with dignity. "Well, good-by, Lucy." * * * * *