"You're learning too fast. Live outdoors, avoid neurosis, and so escape the common cold. I think they could stand for the flush toilet--but they would be more concerned in getting the nitrogen back to the topsoil than they would in the orchid rims. First things first and a conscious sense of responsibility for the future--that's us boys." "Phooie!" "Who do you like--to go on from lunch? Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, George Raft, Rudolph Valentino, Gregory Peck, or some of the new boy friends of the bobby-soxers I'm too old to remember the names of?" "None of them. And I never saw Valentino in a picture." "Meaning him." "At least--he acted as if he had manners." "On the contrary. He did, in a mannerly way, several things banned by the book of etiquette." "Isn't that the same?" "From the woman's viewpoint." "Don't you ever get tired finding imaginary inferiorities in women?" "Did I say it was inferior? It isn't. More realistic, in fact. Don't you, on the other hand, prefer to be appreciated for differences--rather than to worry over the need of proving identities?" "_Modern Woman--the Lost Sex._ You got it out of the book." "It's a pretty good book." Yvonne watched the waiter exchange a filled glass for the empty one. She seemed to want to defer talking while she caught up with something in her mind. She sipped, and stared at the people eating dinner in the azure haze the place calls light, and sipped again. She had a good-sized mouth with a pretty shape: the lipstick went where the lips were, and nowhere else. "I wanted to talk to you. I was ready to pester you. That's why I moved next door. I was going to let you find it out when we came back this evening. I was going to ask you in. I'm not afraid of you." "Smallest achievement in the history of courage." "I want to figure out what to do about Rol. You see--I'm still crazy about him." "Send him to a good psychiatrist." She exhaled with gentle violence. "Try it!" "You said he was very upset--promised you anything. That was your chance to make him promise psychiatry. You seem to have read books about it--" She shook her head. "Not many, really. You don't understand. Rol wasn't in the least bit upset because of what _he'd_ done. He was upset about my attitude over it. He said it was a 'trivial incident'--and told me he loved me--and said I was frigid and what did I expect. He said he didn't consider he'd been unfaithful to me--and talked on and on about being 'human.' Imagine!" "Are you?" The blush came again. She spoke in a low voice, "Mostly." "People," I said, "don't want to know about people, nowadays." "Did they ever?" "Here and there--by fits and starts. They had a short spell of wanting to find out about themselves through reason--a couple of centuries ago. Innumerable spells of trying to figure themselves out through religions." "But not now?" She was sarcastic. "Nobody knows anything now?"