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 "That's strange," he said trucullently. "I'm an easy enough target."

Mamie stood there, making horrid little pushing noises, and looking dreadfully arch. "You never say anything that anybody can understand," she complained.

"Do you want a drink?" he suggested. It was the least ambiguous remark that occurred to him, and he had to say something.

He felt as though he could do with another himself, and steered Mamie to the table. Impossible as Mamie was, she was at least a safe haven for the moment, and there was nobody else to turn to. All afternoon she had been practising new gestures before she forgot them and breaking inanely into other people's conversations with her utterly non-Gallic but painstakingly foreign French. If she only had a sense of humor she'd be gorgeous, he was thinking, pouring Mamie the mildest beverage he could find, in view of her coddled throat. The gold embroidery on her black satin dress was ravelling, the pollen on her sallow face had dusted off on her chest. You could hardly call it a bosom, thought Grover. . How anything as long and narrow as Mamie could, on occasion, make such prodigious volumes of sound was, to Grover, as to everybody else, a mystery. She must be all hings, like sea-weed, he concluded. Mamie disapproved of the old school of operatics that taught you to walk eight paces towards the footlights with your hand over your