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She stopped

"I don't know," she said

He was cold "Can't you remember?"

"It's been so long"

"Only ten years, that's all, only ten!"

"Don't get excited, I'h that went up and up "Funny, how funny, not to remember where or when you met your husband or wife"

He layhis eyes, his brow, and the back of his neck, slowly He held both hands over his eyes and applied a steady pressure there as if to crush memory into place It was suddenlyin a lifetime that he knohere he had met Mildred

"It doesn't matter" She was up, in the bathroo sound she made

"No, I guess not," he said

He tried to count how ht of the visit froarettes in their straight-lineddown into the layer upon layer of night and stone and stagnant spring water, and he wanted to call out to her, how ht! the capsules! how many will you take later and not know? and so on, every hour! or ht or to while, now that this has started And he thought of her lying on the bed with the two technicians standing straight over her, not bent with concern, but only standing straight, ar then that if she died, he was certain he wouldn't cry For it would be the dying of an unknown, a street face, a newspaper iun to cry, not at death but at the thought of not crying at death, a silly ery snake made her still more empty

How do you get so empty? he wondered Who takes it out of you? And that awful flower the other day, the dandelion! It had su, hadn't it? "What a shame! You're not in love with anyone!" And why not?

Well, wasn't there a wall between him and Mildred, when you came down to it? Literally not just one wall but, so far, three! And expensive, too! And the uncles, the aunts, the cousins, the nieces, the nephews, that lived in those walls, the gibbering pack of tree-apes that said nothing, nothing, nothing and said it loud, loud, loud He had taken to calling them relatives from the very first "How's Uncle Louis today?" "Who?" "And Aunt Maude?" The nificant irl in a forest without trees (how odd!) or rather a little girl lost on a plateau where there used to be trees (you could feel thein the center of the "living roo that was now Noto Mildred

"So must be done!"

"Yes, so must be done!"

"Well, let's not stand and talk!"