"Yes," said Temple, wishing he could change the subject. "My girl." He hadn't thought of Stephanie in a long time, perhaps because it was meaningless to think of someone dead fifty centuries. Now that the thoughts had been stirred within him, though, he found them poignantly pleasant. "Your girl ... and you would marry her if you could?" He had grown attached to Sophia, not in reality, but in the second of their dream worlds. He wished the memory of the dream had not lingered for it disturbed him. In it he had loved Sophia as much as he now loved Stephanie although the one was obtainable and the other was a five-thousand year pinch of dust. And how much of the dream lingered with him, in his head and his heart? "Let's forget about it," Temple suggested. "No. If she were here today and if everything were normal, would you marry her?" "Why talk about what can't be?" "I want to know, that's why." "All right. Yes, I would. I would marry Stephanie." "Oh," said Sophia. "Then what happened in the dream meant ... nothing." "We were two different people," Temple said coolly, then wished he hadn't for it was only half-true. He remembered everything about the dream-which-was-more-than-a-dream vividly. He had been far more intimate with Sophia, and over a longer period of time, than he had ever been with Stephanie. And even if Stephanie appeared impossibly on the spot and he spent the rest of his life as her husband, still he would never forget his dream-life with Sophia. In time he could let himself tell her that. But not now; now the best thing he could do would be to change the subject. "I see," Sophia answered him coldly. "No, you don't. Maybe some day you will." "There's nothing but what you told me. I see." "No ... forget it," he told her wearily. "Of course. It was only a dream anyway. The dream before that I almost killed you out of hatred anyway. Love and hate, I guess they neutralize. We're just a couple of people who have to do a job together, that's all." "For gosh sakes, Sophia! That isn't true. I loved Stephanie. I still would, were Stephanie alive. But she's--she's about as accessible as the Queen of Sheba." "So? There's an American expression--you're carrying a torch." Probably, Temple realized, it was true. But what did all of that have to do with Sophia? If he and Sophia ... if they ... would it be fair to Sophia? It would be exactly as if a widower remarried, with the memory of his first wife set aside in his heart ... no, different, for he had never wed Stephanie, and always in him would be the desire for what had never been. "Let's talk about it some other time," Temple almost pleaded, wanting the respite for himself as much as for Sophia. "No. We don't have to talk about it ever. I won't be second best, Kit. Let's forget all about it and do our job. I--I'm sorry I brought the whole thing up."