"You know it then?"

"Yes. Oh yes."

"Shall I turn it off?"

"No. Please don't." For the next hour they laughed and chuckled over the ageless farce of marriage and war. Perry was particularly delighted to recognize Diana among the Grecian wenches, and pointed out his discovery with a glee. Diana looked pleased, but protested when Perry insisted in whispers that Diana should have had the leading role.

Presently the play came to its rollicking finish, and the machine clicked to a stop. Perry found Diana smothering a yawn. She made a face at him. "Sorry, but I was up earlier than you were."

"I'm sleepy myself."

"Ready for bed?"

"I think so. Where do I sleep?"

"Anywhere you like. Where you were last night is as good as any."

Perry accepted the suggestion and made himself comfortable on that part of the couch. Diana lay down across the room, called out a languid goodnight, and with as little ceremony as a cat, curled up and appeared to fall at once to sleep. Perry lay on his back, eyes closed but head seething with confused impressions and idea sequences, each demanding immediate attention. Sleep seemed impossible but nevertheless in a very few minutes he sank into the soft warm glow that precedes it. Soon he was breathing slowly.

A scream of terror cut through the room. Diana sat up and switched on the light. Perry was sitting up also, his eyes staring, horrified. She ran to his side. "Perry, Perry, my dear. What happened?" He clung to her hand.

"I was falling. It seemed like I landed here in the dark. I'm all right now. It was just a bad dream."

"There. There. It's all right." She soothed and comforted him. "Just wait a minute. I'll leave the light on." She left him and returned quickly with a cup of the same steamy, spicy mixture that he had drunk the night before. "Now drink this slowly."

He touched her hand. "Dian', I know I'm being a baby, but will you stay with me for a little?"

"Of course, Perry."

When he finished his drink, she lay down beside him, put her arms around him, and rested his head on her breast. "Now just relax and be quiet. You're safe and I won't leave you." In a very few minutes he was sleeping peacefully. Diana held him a little while longer then gently uncurled herself and sat up. She massaged the pins and needles out of her arm and watched Perry's face. After a long time she bent over and kissed him quickly and softly on the lips. He smiled without wakening. Then she returned to her place on the couch. Now it was her turn to have trouble wooing sleep. Why had she kissed him? It was a silly thing to do. She wasn't in love with him. Of course not. She didn't know him and didn't feel any strong physical attraction for him. One didn't fall in love with savages anyhow. And that was just what he was, essentially. He hadn't acted like a savage though. Nevertheless, anyone brought up in the first part of the twentieth century couldn't possibly be a fit companion for a girl nowdays. He would be sure to be emotionally unstable. He was unstable; that crying out in the night proved it. He hadn't anything to fear. But suppose I had just fallen to my death, she thought. He wasn't dead. No, but he thought he was. No, he didn't either. It was very confusing. He had looked so hurt and lonesome. Then when he went to sleep he looked so young it had made her melt. That was why, just sympathy, just the way she had kissed the top of Captain Kidd's furry cap after she cut a thorn out of his paw. Just sympathy. But why had she urged him to stay until he got oriented? There were institutions for that, quite capable and better equipped than she was. Oh damn, why hadn't she turned Captain Kidd in when he first came mewing at the door and demanding attention? Diana, you're a fool and any animal or child or man or woman that wants to can move you right out of your own home. Hadn't she built this house for privacy? Hadn't she come here so she could take out her soul and examine it in private? And now how could she? What interesting eyes he had. Yet he didn't look at her, except to meet her gaze. Didn't he think she was pretty? Could she be getting old? Were the women in 1939 more beautiful than they were today? Or would he think so? But then what if he did? Certainly she was not interested.

Diana got up and fixed herself a cup of the sedative, drank it, sought a new place on the couch, arranged herself in a ball and fell asleep.*

[*Diana grew up in a transport car. Both of her parents were interested in her and liked her and she, fortunately or perhaps in consequence, felt a warm affection and respect for them. Both her father and mother preferred the more casual hit-or-miss training that a child receives from interested parents to the presumably more scientific, certainly more systematic, training a modern child receives in our development centers. Her father had spent most of his active life in food technique. He was a man of considerable imagination and great talent in organization. Several of our present home comforts can be attributed in whole or in part to his effort. He invented the autotherm food container and induced others to develop it to the point that we now have it, cheap enough to use and throw away. Nearly forty years ago as an assistant engineer for the Cuisine Company (a forerunner of Universal Foods) he started the first agitation for natural texture in synthetic proteins. He left this company and founded Ambrosia, Ltd., while still a very young man, in order to permit two synthetic chemists to use all the credit they liked in their laboratory. The results we meet every day at dinner—sausages that have never seen a pig and soup stock that grew in a test tube.

His energies were not confined to food. His bitter controversy with Polenski over the merits of dry point etching and the current acid thermal process is remembered by all devotees of that esoteric art. His assertion that the modern man is better fitted physically, mentally, and emotionally to cope with the wilderness barehanded than his savage ancestors caused a storm of argument which reached a dramatic climax in his year of practical experiment on an uninhabited South Pacific island. He took Diana with him on this adventure, a slim girl-child of ten. His triumphant return, a modern Crusoe, hale, hearty, and filled with boasts is known to every romantic boy and was the basis for a flood of story records, written, directed and acted by lesser men.

Diana's mother was less spectacular but equally important in the development of the girl's character. She was a surgeon, of a line of surgeons and healers. Calm and cool, with large slender bony hands, more expressive than her placid face, she seemed detached from her surroundings and fully alive only when those delicate sensitive fingers were cutting the line between life and death. Although it was the father who encouraged the child to dance, it was the mother who insisted that she persevere in her studies until she produced a worthwhile result, a technique of her own.

Diana grew up with first one, then the other, of these assorted progenitors and occasionally with both when their several occupations permitted family life. Her mother selected the instructional records for the child's formal primary education and cultural orientation. Her father supplemented this with little excursions to cultural and industrial centers to make concrete what she learned from the recordings. On her mother's insistence Diana lived for two years in a development center during her adolescence in order that she might experience the practical realities of social self government and understand the background of a large portion of the population.

Ideal or not, Diana flourished in this environment and grew up, not only strong and healthy, but with a mind agile and uninhibited, a temperament sunny and free from boredom, a memory packed with a wide variety of information and skills arranged in reasonably efficient integration. The possible flaw in her character, if flaw it were , lay in her quick emotional sympathy, the ease with which she felt the pain and sorrows of others. It prevented her from following in her mother's career as a surgeon, as she could not manage the detached viewpoint necessary to protect the surgeon from the emotional impact of the suffering she treated. This joint in her armor led her too easily into emotional relationships, especially with the opposite sex. In her late teens she suffered a severe hurt through a love affair with a young poet, who was ill with a cycloid neurosis probably psychotic in character. He became obsessed with her dancing and took his own life while watching the climax of one of her emotional numbers. It is easy of course to say that he should not have been at large, but the reader knows as well as the writer that our preventive diagnoses are not infallible and that we cannot afford to take the risk of violating the customs on which our liberty is based.