"I'm beginning to think it's no use try'n'a explain it to you." "Tom!" "Hell, like a poisoner _always_ does! You want to bet? Happened a million times. I read a book--" "Tom!" "Yeah? You better not have any more, June." "Don't _want_ any more--not why I called you. Just wanted say, 'm sorry 'f anything I said gave 'fense. None 'tended. All's I want's everybody be happy." _But the defense_-- "Sure, June, that's okay." "'S my whole life right 'ere, see? Ask anybody knows me." "O_kay_, June!" _The defense never rests._ "Okay he says, he keeps saying okay, Jesus Christ, you ought to listen I'm telling you, not just keep saying okay, okay. Ever since I was little girl, honest, all's I ever wanted was everybody be happy." 4 ... O how can Love's eye be true, That is so vex'd with watching and with tears? SHAKESPEARE, _Sonnet CXLVIII_ I Thought of work had halted Edith's aimless wandering on the Christmas-spattered evening streets downtown. Now the drawing table and empty chair in her studio brought Callista poignantly close in absence. How arrogantly, like a beloved child, Callista had captured her life! Window-shopping with no heart for it, necessary gifts already bought, she had become fed up with Winchester, noise, people, sidewalk grit flung by the wind; with gaudy lights desperately imitating good cheer, drizzle-nosed bell-ringers and Santa Clauses, carols once pretty now done to death, fed up with crowd faces till she recoiled from them as from a rat-race of tragic masks. Getting off the bus--she seldom used her car downtown, hating the struggle of searching out a parking space--her skirt was twitched up by the breeze for the lech of a pair of whistling teen-agers. Edith had been dourly amused. _Try looking at the face some time, kids!_--and the mood kept with her as far as her third floor walkup on Hallam Street. The hour was nine-thirty, Papa Doorn just closing his delicatessen on the ground floor, giving her a gentle "Good night, Miss Nolan!" No mail but a swatch of ads drenched in the season's gladness, and the janitor would never provide a wastebasket in the entry. She dumped the mess in the studio trash-box, glancing at the cameras, screens, props, at the dim end of the studio. A fantastic way to earn a living, close to the mainstream of human vanity. But at this end, with the north light, wall-shelves, drawing table, work could be done after survival was taken care of. Callista's work for a year, and Edith's own. The bread-and-butter end of the studio was already dusty. Edith had canceled portrait engagements for the duration of the trial, disinclined to hire a temporary helper: why knock oneself out immortalizing the fish-faced?