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 to move and eat and observe the cardinal precautions of existence—”

“And recognize the current mode in time to standardize themselves,” Mark Frost put in.

“Well, yes. And I don’t object to that, either,” Fairchild said. “As a purely lay brother to the human race, I mean. After all they are merely articulated genital organs with a kind of aptitude for spending whatever money you have; so when they get themselves up to look exactly like all the other ones, you can give all your attention to their bodies.”

“How about the exceptions?” Mark Frost asked. “The ones that don’t paint or bob their hair?”

“Poor things,” Fairchild answered, and the Semitic man said:

“Perhaps there is a heaven, after all.”

“You believe they have souls, then?” Fairchild asked.

“Certainly. If they are not born with them, it’s a poor creature indeed who can’t get one from some man by the time she’s eleven years old.”

“That’s right,” Fairchild agreed. He watched the group forward for a time. Then he rose. “I think I’ll go over and hear what they’re talking about.”

Mrs. Wiseman came up and borrowed a cigarette of Mark Frost, and they watched Fairchild’s burly retreating back. The Semitic man said: “There’s a man of undoubted talent, despite his fumbling bewilderment in the presence of sophisticated emotions.”

“Despite his lack of self-assurance, you mean,” Mark Frost corrected.

“No, it isn’t that,” Mrs. Wiseman put in. “You mean the same thing that Julius does: that having been born an American of a provincial midwestern lower middle class family, he