Usually that floors them. But not this one. She rocked with the punch and calmly pointed at my violin case. "You can remedy that," she said. "Why in Hades should I? Do you think any sane person would deliberately hurt himself in that manner?" "Am I not desirable?" she asked. "Would I not be good to come home to? Don't you often long for somebody you can talk to, somebody who will get your meals and listen to your troubles, somebody who _cares_?" Well, of course I've heard those exact words a billion or more times before. Not that they were always directed at me. Nevertheless, there was nothing new in them. "And," she repeated, "am I not desirable?" "Yes," I said, looking at my wristwatch and getting uneasy because of the delay. "But that has nothing to do with it. When my marriage was annulled--oh, somewhere back in the eighteenth century, or was it the sixteenth--I swore by all the gods I'd never marry again. Moreover, Mother says I'm too busy...." "Are you man or mouse?" she flashed. "Neither!" I flashed back. "Besides, Mother is my employer. What would I do if she fired me? Become like one of those?" I glanced contemptuously at the guests. She knew what I was thinking, for she cried, "Look at me! I'm wounded! But am I like them? Am I one of the halt, the lame, the blind? Am I like that detective who swells himself into a gross human balloon because he stuffs the growing void of his hurt with food? "Am I like our hostess, whose green wound caused her to drive away two husbands because it festered so deep she went into a delirium of unfounded imaginings about them? And then got a third who fulfilled the image she'd built up of the first two? "And am I like that thin-lipped woman who deep-freezes her wound because she is mortally afraid of pain? And do I behave as some of these women here who throw themselves at every man who might give temporary healing, all the while knowing deep within them that the wound will become more poisonous? "Is it my fault if most of these people don't cultivate their wounds, if they grow sickly and twisted and ill-smelling plants from them instead of the lovely and colorful and sweet flower that grows in me?" She seized my shoulders, said, "Look me in the eye! Can you see what _you_ and you _alone_, did? Is it disgusting, gangrenous? Or is it beautiful? And if it does turn poisonous, whose fault is it? Who refused to heal me?" Her eloquence was overwhelming. I trembled. I wasn't affected when I overheard other wounded addressing their potential healers thus. But when _I_ was talked to in such a manner, I shook, and I remembered the early days when my first wife and I had tended each other's injuries. "Sorry," I mumbled, abashed before this raging yet tender mortal. "I must be going." "No you don't!" she said firmly. She stopped and lifted the lid from the paper box. I saw it was crammed with those damned 3-D glasses.