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RV 166 York in winter, Hudson in summer Staple topics: snow for six months, mosquitoes the other. I suppose that's the reason your generation have got the fidgets!"

Nona laughed. "It's a good enough reason; and anyhow there's nothing to be done about it."

Wyant frowned. "Nothing to be done about it—in Lita's case? I hope you don't mean that. My son—God, if ever a man has slaved for a woman, made himself a fool for her"

Heuston's dry voice cut the diatribe. "Well, sir, you wouldn't deprive him of man's peculiar privilege: the right to make a fool of himself?"

Wyant sank back grumbling among his cushions. "I don't understand you, any of you," he said, as if secretly relieved by the admission.

"Well, Exhibit dear, strictly speaking you don't have to. We're old enough to run the show for ourselves, and all you've got to do is to look on from the front row and admire us," said Nona, bending to him with a caress.

In the street she found herself walking silently at Heuston's side. These weekly meetings with him at Wyant's were becoming a tacit arrangement: the one thing in her life that gave it meaning. She thought with a smile of her mother's affirmation that everything always came out right if only one kept on being brave and trustful, and wondered where, under that formula, her relation to Stanley Heuston could be fitted in. It was anything but