She threw the robe aside, and I saw she was wearing a scanty garment beneath it. Evidently the huddlers didn't swim naked, and I wondered at a moral code that sanctioned drinking alcohol but was ashamed of the human body. I was glad the house had been cold when I answered the maid's summons, for I had worn a robe I'd found there. Fruit juice and wheat cakes and sausage and toast and jelly and eggs and milk. We ate in a small room, off a larger dining room, a small room whose walls were glass on two sides. "It's too old a house to modernize completely," Jean told me. "I grew up in this house." "You don't--work, Jean?" "No. Should I?" "Work or study. Life must be very dull if you don't do one of those." "You might have a point there," she said. "I tried everything from the movies to sculpture. I wasn't very good at anything. What do you do, Fred?" "I'm a perpetual guest," I said lightly. "Do you read much, Jean?" "Too much, though nothing very heavy, I grant you." "Have you ever read about a man named Ambrose Bierce?" "I've read everything he ever wrote. Why did you ask that, Fred?" "I--heard about him. I wondered who he was." "Where did you hear about him, Fred? In Mexico?" "No. I don't remember where I heard about him." "He disappeared," she said quietly, "some time right before the first world war. I've forgotten the exact year. I think it was 1914." Before the war, before the "first" war.... And I thought of Jars' wife, who had come to us just before this last planetary war--the "second" world war. And what was his pet name for her? Guest, he called her, and joked about her coming from another world. But didn't Jars defend the discredited late-in-life theories of Akers? I tried to remember the name of Jars' wife, and then it came. I asked, "And Amelia Earhart?" Jean's voice was rough. "July 2nd, 1937. I guess I'll never forget that, when my god died. What are you trying to say? Is it some new damned cult you're promoting, Fred?" "You called her a god. Why, Jean?" "I don't know. I was only thirteen when she died. But she was so clean, so--so free and windswept, so--oh, what the spirit of America should be--and isn't." I looked up to see tears in her eyes. Why was she moved? This girl who certainly knew corruption, this worldly, lovely girl. I smiled at her. She wiped the tears with the back of her hand. "Fred, you are the strangest--I know this town's a zoo, but you, Fred--" I continued to smile at her. "I'm just a guy trying to learn. May I repeat something I said last night? You're beautiful, Jean." "You're no three-headed calf, yourself," she said. Twin planets and parallel evolution.... Parallel destiny? Not with a third planetary war shaping up here. Three major wars in less than fifty years. Why, why, why.... She said, "Thinking, again? You do a lot of thinking, don't you?"