"Ned Bacon told me you'd be home today and I know you're sucker for girls in pants." CHAPTER XVI This Friday, Robin and I packed a bag, bought groceries and liquor, got into the car and got off The Rock. We drove out toward Trenton, and ten miles this side of Princeton Junction we turned off the express highway onto Gun Hill Road, went through the fat Jersey farmland and finally reached Stokewold, a village of one church, one supermarket, one bank, one--Oh, one of each. You take the right fork out of Stokewold around the pond and it's two miles to Gabby and Jake's house which they've named Cooper Union. By the time we reached Stokewold we were halfway into a laughing jag. We always start laughing on the way to visit the Lennoxes. You think about their accidents and adventures building their house and you can't stop.... The three second-hand cars Gabby bargained for and bought which, one after the other, broke down as soon as she got them home, turning the place into a Used Car lot. The time Jake got arrested for trucking their nine-foot plate glass picture window on the express highway. The big July Fourth party weekend when the water system went haywire and Gabby tried to empty out a hundred gallon tank with a teacup. Privately, Robin and I call the house Hysteria Cottage. Outside of Ned Bacon, Robin and I are the only people from the business who like to see the Lennoxes. The Rock's turned its back on them. But we love to come down to Cooper Union and help Gabby and Jake build their house. We hammer and saw and paint while Gabby lectures to us from Builder's Guides. Robin plants, mostly, and I'm the king of the concrete, I have a touch with a trowel that astonishes people ... including myself. The reason the house is still building is that they blew all their money on the property. They have about a hundred acres of farmland, meadow, timber, and whatever else they call rural-type land. The house (what there is of it) is on a small hill shaded by elms. A hundred yards behind the house is a tiny extinct quarry which was flooded out by natural springs years ago. We swim there in summer and the water's glacial. Gabby's pregnant. Gabby's the cute type. Her figure's exactly the same except she looks like she swallowed the head of a torpedo. Ned Bacon, who lets on to be a shingling expert, spends all his time finding out if it's going to be a boy or a girl. He makes her lie down, borrows a wedding ring (Gabby doesn't have one yet), and dangles it on a string over her stomach. The theory is, if it swings in circles it'll be a girl and if it swings back and forth in a straight line it'll be a boy. So far the odds are seven to three on a boy.