"You know you pushed that affair." She was a little drunk, he saw, but no harm in that: under better circumstances, he'd have called it a happy drunk. "Remember how he and I first met? You were pub crawling with him one evening last year after you got back from Europe. You ran into me at the mulled-wine place; I was eating piroshki and looked very unglamorous, but I thought I'd have some fun with you--oh, hell, Bob, I thought there might be a chance to make you jealous--so I gave Bruce a big play. And you were delighted!" "I thought he needed a girl friend," he said. "There's more in life than books and beer." "You pander," she chuckled. "I'll bet you gloated when you found we were living in sin." He shrugged. "If you can call it sin. Actually, Bruce was a very domestic type. I hoped you'd marry him." "Sure," she said. "So I'm a very domestic type too, aren't I--ain't I--Bob, I know you don't like to dance, and your dancing is awful, but shall we try it just once before dinner?" * * * * * Afterward, when brandy and coffee were completing the meal, she said: "I'm still not sure if I was in love with Bruce or not. I always liked him. I think I was beginning to love him." "I should imagine it would be hard not to, under the circumstances." "He was the first man I ever knew who was--(a)--" she ticked the points off on her fingers--"interesting; which the solid citizens back in Ohio were not, not to me anyway--(b) reliable, which the local Bohemians are not." "Please! Call me what else you will, but not a Berkeley Bohemian." "You don't count. You're in a classification all by yourself. 'Reliable' was the wrong word. What do I mean? Faithful; steady; loving. I guess that's it. Loving--not himself, like most of these perpetual undergraduates; not--whatever you love, Bob, there must be something but I've never found out what unless it's that sailboat of yours. Bruce was loving of me. Loving all the world, but including me." "You could call him tender," agreed Kintyre. "And yet he was a man. We took some rough hikes and pack trips, during the years we knew each other; and lately, after I got him interested in judo, he was doing very well. In the course of these amusements I've seen him get damaged now and then, sometimes rather badly. But he never admitted feeling any pain." "I guess you'd consider that a virtue," she said. * * * * * They parked in the hills, with the Eastbay cities like a galaxy of stars below them, San Francisco an island universe across darkness. She sighed and leaned against him. He wondered, dimly alarmed, why he had come here. "What are you going to do?" she asked him. "Me? In the next few days, you mean? Oh, wind up his University work. Call on his family; haven't seen them in a long time now. What about you?" "Carry on. What else is there?" "I don't know," he said in his helplessness.