They'd rise in the morning and the instant they sat up in their respective beds, the doors of their bedrooms would open, wheeled carts would enter their room, and the house would serve them their breakfasts. Having risen, clean clothes would be supplied. Then they'd hurry to the library, discuss what they'd been reading and then, undisturbed except by luncheon and dinner, they'd read, read, read. * * * * * Sometimes the house would seem to feel that they were devoting too much time to books and it would suddenly and magically produce games and they'd play away an evening. But when the morrow dawned the lure of the books would call them back. Their biggest problem was in deciding which of the books they read were fact and what fiction. This was their only noteworthy argument. One morning for instance, Comstock said, "I found a wonderful old book last night filled with reports on criminals. Fascinating! One of them was about a court in some kingdom or other back on earth where a prince found out that his step-father had murdered his real father in order to marry his mother." "I remember that one," Helen said, "It ended with practically everyone in the court murdered." "That's the one," Comstock nodded. "Y'know," Grundy said. "I wonder if that was really a report on actual criminals." "Must have been," Comstock argued, "no fiction writer would have had the prince dilly dally the way that one did, never able to make up his mind what to do. Only in real life do people bumble along that way." "Mmm...." Grundy disagreed, "I think a fine writer might have done just that in order to make the character seem real." "Prince Hamlet _must_ have been real," Comstock said, "He could not have been imagined. No, I'm sure that is fact. But this book I'm reading now, what nonsense!" He held up Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." "What an imagination! Fantastic!" Shaking his head he went on with his reading. * * * * * It was a day or two later when he was reading what he considered another criminal report, the story of a Moor and jealousy, that the idea occurred to him. Putting down the book, he stared thoughtfully off into space. The idea had just never entered his brain before. Was it possible, he wondered, that he might be able to woo Helen away from Grundy? Not knowing a thing about how to go about it interfered quite a bit, he found. His flirtation, if you could call it that, began to resemble a game of hide and go seek, for he would lurk in dark corners of the house and wait for Helen to walk by alone. Then, darting out, he'd try to manufacture love talk, or what seemed to pass for it in the book he'd been reading. One day, having succeeded in scaring Helen half out of her wits, by popping out of a linen closet and appearing at her side completely unexpectedly, he made a groping motion and managed to capture one of her hands. Bending over it, he kissed it.