I am not a jealous man and even my envies are of an obscure sort. The momentary shock came from the fact that, never before, had I thought of Ricky as married to another man. Romantic about another man--perhaps. (Hadn't I said, in fun and also meaning it, that if, in our seventies, she were to swear she had been faithful, I would regard it as sad? No man desires a wanton for a wife. But a great many men love their wives in such a fashion as to consider them people--human, curious, imaginative, subject to sensations of staleness, capable of discretion, and not intended to be--through every hour of all that is a life--belled, balled and chained, hobbled and kept like cattle. An academic point--now. We might never see those seventies--note the envisaged smiles--or hear the candlelit confidence.) She would marry again. Karen would marry. The bonds I'd bought, the real estate, the insurance I'd purchased down the years--flush or borrowing--would provide a measure of security. _Come war? Come vast inflation? Costly sickness?_ There is no security on our planet. There is no way, by money, wills, investments, legal instruments, or other means, to carry even the smallest wish or the most minimal responsibility beyond crematory and urn. Such is the aching truth--the irony we try to avoid. No one understands it better than I--but I had done what I could to avoid it, too. Done it--in spite of a national tax philosophy that evaluates authorship as a meaner trade than pawnbroking. In all America are only five thousand of us who make our whole livelihood by writing, anyway. To Congress--a scattered, inconsequential number--vote-voiceless and therefore impotent. It is a figure--five thousand in one hundred and fifty millions--which the aspiring writer should bear in mind. And some are communists, or leftists, besides--which, in the miserable eyes of Congress these days, no doubt makes our whole profession suspect. Freedom is sick. Freedom is dying. Why not? Everything is sick and doomed. Including me--now, I thought jeeringly. My plate came--the toast-brown fish, the green-speckled potato, a salad I hadn't ordered, tartar sauce in a dish, and the applesauce in another. I pushed Congress out of my mind. More accurately, the girl did. She cleared her throat. A little sound, with faint annoyance clinging to it. I had been sitting there, smoking two cigarettes, oblivious to her for ten minutes. She must have assumed that I had chosen to sit beside her because she was attractive--which was true. But now, owing to the absence of sidewise glances, of self-conscious bread-buttering, of any aura of awareness, she had irritatedly cleared her throat. If I had spoken to her forthwith she would, perhaps, have made a short, polite, but discouraging reply. Since, however, I had broken off even the peripheral touching of consciousness, she coughed vexedly, exploringly.