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 “I wouldn’t take it, only they hurt me so damn bad. I’ll do something for you some day, David. I swear I will.”

“Sure,” he repeated. “I don’t need it.”

He rose, and she came to her feet in a single motion, before he could offer to help her. “I swear I wouldn’t take it if they didn’t hurt me so much, David,” she persisted, putting her hand on his shoulder and raising her tanned serious face.

“Sure, I know.”

“I’ll pay you back somehow. Come on: let’s get out of here.”

Mrs. Wiseman and Miss Jameson drove Mrs. Maurier moaning and wringing her hands, from the galley and prepared lunch—grapefruit again, disguised thinly.

“We have so many of them,” the hostess apologized helplessly. “And the steward gone We are aground, too, you see,” she explained.

“Oh, we can stand a little hardship, I guess,” Fairchild reassured her jovially. “The race hasn’t degenerated that far. In a book, now, it would be kind of terrible; if you forced characters in a book to eat as much grapefruit as we do, both the art boys and the humanitarians would stand on their hindlegs and howl. But in real life— In life, anything might happen; in actual life people will do anything. It’s only in books that people must function according to arbitrary rules of conduct and probability; it’s only in books that events must never flout credulity.”

“That’s true,” Mrs. Wiseman agreed. “People’s characters, when writers delineate them by revealing their likings and dislikings, always appear so perfect, so inevitably consistent, but in li—”

“That’s why literature is art and biology isn’t,” her brother