I shook my head vigorously. "Cost too much on a newspaper salary. She said she didn't want any until we could afford them. I was fool enough to believe her. Then when we could afford them she didn't want them. Can't say I blame her." "Did she make you happy?" "Of course not! Who wants to be happy? She made me miserable, but it was exciting to be around her. I never knew what I'd find when I got home--a knockdown drag-out fight over nothing at all or hearts-and-flowers equally over nothing." Arthurjean yawned. "That part's convincing," she agreed. "I'll play this one straight. You're Frank Jacklin _and_ Winnie Tompkins rolled into one. The point is, where do we go from here? Let's see you sign Jacklin's name." I pulled out Winnie's gold, life-time fountain pen and wrote "Frank E. Jacklin" over and over again on the back of an envelope. She studied it carefully. "That's no phony," she agreed, "and it's nothing like Winnie's handwriting. Think I could get a check cashed on it?" "Let's try," I suggested. "Tomorrow when I get to the office I'll pre-date a check on the Riggs Bank at Washington. You mail it in for collection and we'll see if it clears." She shook her head. "No dice! If I tried that, first thing we know we'd have the A.B.A. dicks after you for forgery. Can you think of anything else?" "Not unless you go to Washington and see Dorothy in O.S.S. and ask her to verify my handwriting. Or, wait. You can go and talk to her and notice whether she wriggles her nose to keep her spectacles up. You can find out whether she's still nuts about Prokofiev. You can ask if she still thinks that Ernest Hemingway is a worse writer than Charles Dickens, and whether she still uses Chanel's Gardenia perfume." "That's enough," she interrupted. "But how'm I going to get to Washington and do all these things?" "Next week," I said, "you and I can fly down on a business trip--war-contracts, cut-backs, something official--and while I'm being whip-sawed by the desk-heroes you can check on Dorothy. See if I'm not right." She nodded. "That's one way. What can we cook up? The office is tied up in estate work and that leaves no chance for Uncle Sam. You get what he leaves the heirs and they tell me that the inheritance tax is here to stay." I considered the problem. "Tell you what, Arthurjean," I replied. "I've been thinking this over. The war's going to end this summer. What I saw on the Alaska means that nobody can hold out against us. The Germans are on their last legs, but most of the wise guys are saying that it will take from eighteen months to two years to clean up Japan--a million casualties, billions of dollars. This thorium bomb will do the trick and the war will be over by Labor Day. There's a chance for Winnie Tompkins to make another two or three millions." She laughed sardonically. "How?" "There's uranium stocks," I suggested.