He's an artist--and they're different. She's just another of those rich wives on the make. I bet you wish you were one, yourself, you hypocrite! Poor Mrs. Wylie! She's a nice, quiet girl and I'll bet he swept her off her feet--because that's what newspapermen and writers all are: chasers. Those quiet ones knock over more husbands than all the flashy jobs in town! We all do, if we get a chance. I don't blame either of them. I think both of them are stinkers. Whose business is it? Up with the dishes, down with the cars, in with the stapler, out with the phone plugs--and on and on while typewriters paused and adding machines stood briefly still. Romance or scandal--take your choice. And never a sign to me but Jay's gleam--never a future syllable to Ricky: a conspiracy of employed custom, reinforced by a small world of reciprocal liking. I wondered what they'd think if they knew the truth. But, then, I always wonder that. I'm the silly jackass who does. Look--waiters, busboys, and you over there in the cage with the pointed auburn haircut and the long eyelashes and the tight dress--here we have a handsome young woman who has set about, by means not nearly so rare or unorthodox as you pretend among yourselves--to find one or two universals, or fundamentals, which are not in the book. What book? Not in any? Oh--yes--those banned novels. And those mournful characters who thought only of their pale, poetical brows plunging into the Pit, the lonely well. Or sordid sun-tan oil on Jackson's vulgar beach. When will the poets get the censors off _their_ backs, too--and write like men, for a change? God's no fairy, or Satan, either. What foul compulsion is this--that every page of the Tragedy must itself be mournful stuff, sinister, or sick? Farce, instead! Does the tragic deer, the beautiful, the doomed, imbue his every poolside hour with dolorous contemplation? Must all the activities of the woodchuck be regarded as dismal? To write the stark terms of our essence on every breath and sentence of the moment is to be the own advocate of death, the white bones himself, and to overlook the splendor with such eyeless concentration that the poem becomes a joke on the poet. I flirted with Yvonne--told her stories of Paris and Hollywood and Miami Beach--held her hand--all, in chivalrous camouflage. Paul came at last. I hardly needed to see the stoop--the broken reach to push open the doors that enclosed our cold air cube--to know that, between us, we had not lifted his oppression. For, when it is succubus that's lost, incubus perforce remains. He looked disapprovingly at Yvonne. "Mrs. Prentiss, this is my nephew," I said. "Paul Wilson." "Hello, Mrs. Prentiss." He turned from her. "I'll barge along, Phil. I thought you'd be alone." "Oh, hell, sit." "Really--it's not possible!" His ardent features were emphasized by pallor--and shooting about on his face, besides.