"Yes, a little." She heard the righteous reproach; it must have done Jim good to put her in the wrong. "What did she say?" "She said: 'Go away, my love!'" He would be still there. She heard breathing, and the background noise, a hot trumpet squeaking up the summits of banality. She said: "Jim, do you still love her at all?" But how could she know the color of the word in his language? How was he to glimpse the meanings of it in her own? If even Sam Grainger couldn't quite admit that divergence of language long ago (_my own language far simpler then!_) if not even Sam (_where are you?_) then how could poor Jim Doherty who had no wish to think for himself? "What else did she say?" Hadn't Jim heard the idiot question? It seemed to her the question had been divided, an echo-voice asking of another with another name: _Sam (where are you?) do you still love her (the name was Red-Top, remember?) or think of her at all?_ Meanwhile--"She said nothing else, Jim, nothing I heard." "Oh. I--look, I never told her--I mean--oh, _I_ don't know. I--" Edith held the receiver further away with its wiry babble of misery: "I tried to make her understand--that part, all in her head--she--" "She fell in love with what she wanted you to be." "What? No, you're wrong, she _wasn't_ in love with me." "That's what I meant, Jim. She loved an image, not a man. Only, there was a--" (_Edith, stop! Don't say it!_)--"a tangible male involved in it too, who happened to get her pregnant." "I--can't go for that psychological stuff. She's over eighteen. Well, I know, you can beat me over the head with the pregnancy if you want to, but since it wasn't God's will that it should live, what can I do?" "What she said, perhaps." She heard her own voice electric, hurting in her ears. "If she were still carrying it, what _would_ you do? That would be wages of sin, I guess? The way it was God's will you should try out a virgin for variety, or kicks? Or did you just feel that if an unconventional, unreligious girl wasn't a whore she ought to be?" "I shouldn't have called. God forgive you." Edith set the instrument down. The trembling would presently stop. Overcharge of adrenalin, stupid physical need to slash again, with claws. She fumbled a cigarette from the box by the telephone. Anyway Jim would not call back. He'd rest on the dignity of his last word, which Father Bland would have approved.