"So Paul would get tossed on the street. And come back. And you'd have to call cops. I'm sure Hattie knows the ones to call. Then I'd get a buzz from jail. And Paul would have that indignity to sweat out--on top of everything else. Don't you see he holds the whole business against me--and he likes me? Against family, friends, the kind of people from whom he comes? Against the people he cares about--and the way of life he's been brought up in? If you'd write him the truth--he could transfer the damage to the place where it belongs. He'd hate you for a while--and what would that mean to you? Nothing. By and by--he'd see that he didn't even hate you--maybe even liked you. Understood. Then he'd be pretty grown up. Enough to hate the way we do on the earth, all of us, if he had to go on hating anything." Marcia smiled gently. Her eyes were inaccessible. "You're right. I liked you--at lunch." "Good." "It could be. I'll tell you what. I'll write--on one condition." "What?" She moved quickly. She moved into my lap and put her arms around me. "My room's just three doors from here." I didn't say a word. "You'll remember it all your life. And I'll have something to remember, too. Paul's uncle! They all go for Marcia! Then--there's about Gwen--" "What?" "She told us this afternoon. I'm jealous of Gwen. I'd like--just for once--to fix her. After all--you're not like Paul; it isn't as if you'd never met a girl in my trade before. What have you got to lose? And I'll write that letter. When he sees it--he'll toss his damned torch in an icebox." What about this Greater Love stuff? I asked myself. She was kissing me--giving me, not invitations, but commands. I got up with her and set her on her feet. "No, baby. You're something. I don't blame Paul. But I play only for myself. Never mix romance in a deal." She slapped me and ran out of the room. My ears ring all the time, anyway--night and day, day and night, as in the song, a sound like spring peepers at a distance, sometimes like a million dinner bells tinkling, tinkling, tinkling, and at other times like a flutenote I'd give a great deal to stop. They rang harder, now. She'd hit with her hand taut and compressed hard air against the shrill, soniferous membrane. It hurt like the dentist. I scrunched myself together and let the sweat roll and looked out the window. The pain calmed down and I kept staring out, hating the earth, afraid, miserable, cheap. I fought back. Once upon a time, billions of years ago, there was a Knower who is identified these days by the name of God. He was totally conscious. He was the Custodian, which is to say the Other Property, of mass-energy and space-time. He was the sublime entropy of the primordial atom, It, the universe, the stable pattern, the All, harmoniously balanced, a fixed ecstasy unmoving and so without Age. Unfortunately, He-She developed an Ego. (Serpent? Eve? The Old Adam?)