"We necked, I said. Back in the old days--last week--I could neck with a boy from the time he cut me out at the prom until bacon and eggs at Child's--and never feel a thing I didn't want to feel. Tonight--though--I lost ground so fast you'd think I was a juvenile delinquent trying her first reefer." "Poor premise--but I get the idea." "And what?" She turned and smiled with excess brightness at George, when he carried in the round, silver tray. "And what--?" She revived the question. "Just as your cute little Paulie-pie was getting interesting--and I thought, interested--he talked himself right into going on the hunt for his Marcia again!" "That's too bad." "It's too bad--and what are you going to do about it?" "Remember what I said concerning how I don't like girls when they drink too much? Even a little bit too much?" Yvonne gulped explosively. "All right, then! So I call up Gwen! And that's your fault!" "Telephone's right beside you." She looked at it sulkily. Then she grabbed it and gave the number. "Hello ... this is Mrs. Roland Prentiss ... is Gwen Taylor there?" She stuck out her tongue at me. "Gwen, darling!... dad's gone, at last ... sure ... that would be lovely ... of course!" "Ace-in-the-hole," I said. "Don't be--" She shrugged and laughed restlessly. "Oh--all right. It's my life, though, isn't it?" "That's the idea." "Phil!" "Present--and unaccountable." I didn't feel witty. "You come with me--" She was standing and she finished the highball standing. I shook my head. "I'm going after Paul." "Where?" "Here and there." I had one idea, anyway. She undid her dress and stepped out of it and threw it over her arm. She looked at me for another moment with eyes both jumpy and expressionless. "You wouldn't regret it." "Some other time, baby. I got to go find that cluck." "See you," she said and swept out in her bra and petticoat. This time, when I heard her shower begin, I locked my door. Then I put on a dry, newly pressed seersucker, a light silk tie, and went out before she decided to try again. The cab tooled along Fifth Avenue a ways, dove through the Park, and rattled into a semislum section--an area of delicatessens and bowling alleys, dated, disreputable hotels, massage parlors, shrieking truck brakes, trickling electric signs, jaded cafeterias, and a crosshatch of streets narrower than the avenues, darker, lined on both sides with identical brownstones that exuded a smell of senescence and rotted brick tenements upon the façades of which hung rusty fire escapes. On the fire escapes were people, their pets, bedding and potted plants, beer pails and radios, along with their accents of Crete, Sicily and the Balkans, Bohemia and Slovakia and Sudetenland--the wonderful poor, the authority for democracy--they said, the intellectuals who had made gods of them without touching them. I looked, listened, sniffed attentively. Last chance. And I remembered.