Children, I thought. No. Not even children. Children is just what they weren't--just what they'd never been--or just what, if they'd ever been, they refused to let themselves remember. These angel-pusses, growing up everywhere in America, psychologically hamstrung or maybe wingstrung in their cribs. Turned into demons by their right-thinking, practical, realistic, common-sense, hard-headed fathers and mothers. Marrying, in no better condition for marriage than nuns and eunuchs. Phooie. I slid my wrist in my cuff. It was after three. "Yvonne," I said, "are you busy tonight?" "I was going to have dinner with dad--as usual. He bucks me up." "Maybe you could do with a substitute bucker-upper, for a change." "Dad told me I ought to go out--call up old friends--" "The hell with what dad told you. And I haven't asked you, yet. I'm fussy, myself. Can you dance?" She nodded. "Rumba?" "Rol was a swell dancer. And we used to have a teacher come to the house--in the days before he lost interest in--me." "Well, I'll pick you up, around eight. The valet keeps my dinner things here--so put on a long dress." "I don't need to be rescued, Mr. Wylie. It's sweet of you. But I'd detest to go out feeling as if I was the object of a missionary project." "Then think of yourself as a missionary to me. I have no date. And I am very uninterested in spending this particular evening alone." "Why?" "Because I'm a writer. I put my heart and brain and libido into the composition of gay, mad, happy stories. Then I have to pay for it--in compensatory funk. Nothing psychological is free. The illusion that it is amounts merely to a passing human fancy--about fifty thousand years old. Surely you're familiar with the fact that humorous authors are melancholy babies, in the flesh? Well, I just miss being a humorous author--so I just miss being a one hundred per cent sourball." "What are you going to do now?" "That's a very possessive question," I said, "in view of the shortness of our acquaintance. However, I am going to cut a serial from two hundred and eighteen pages to one hundred and seventy-eight pages." "_Exactly?_" "Well--within a few lines. And not just this afternoon. It takes days. My wife is up in the country. We were having the house repapered and repainted. Every time I found a quiet corner and started to cut bleeding syllables from my precious prose, some damned craftsman with a mustache like a character in _Midsummer Night's Dream_ spilled paste on my back. So, finally, I scrammed down here. If my wife had known I would have to put in more days on the serial--she'd have postponed the rural clowns. But, not knowing, and with artisans so touchy about their schedules--" "Don't tell me!" she exclaimed. "We just had the house in Pasadena done over!" Her eyes faded. "For what?" She murked about inside herself briefly. "I'd like very much to go out with you--if you really want me to. On one condition." "I know."