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By Root 676 0

sat down in one of the easy chairs and he turned down the sound on the T. V. set. I saw a bottle of one of Moose Beer’s competitors standing on the floor by his chair, half empty. He sat down opposite me, smiling and mopping his forehead with his handkerchief, and answered the preliminary questions with the air of an expert delivering a professional verdict. After he had listened to the telephone commercial he scratched the hair on his chest thoughtfully and gave the sort of enthusiastic response for which a whole seminary of admen had no doubt been offering daily prayers. When we finished and I had written down the name and address, which the company needs so it won’t re-interview the same people, got up, and began to thank him, I saw him lurching out of his chair towards me with a beery leer. “Now what’s a nice little girl like you doing walking around asking men all about their beer?” he said moistly. “You ought to be at home with some big strong man to take care of you.”

I pressed the two Temperance pamphlets into his damp outstretched hand and fled.

I shuffled through four more complete interviews without much incident, discovering in the process that the questionnaire needed the addition of a “Does not have phone … End interview” box and a “Does not listen to radio” one, and that men who approved of the chest-thumping sentiments of the commercial tended to object to the word “Tingly” as being “Too light,” or, as one of them put it, “Too fruity.” The fifth interview was with a spindly balding man who was so afraid of expressing any opinions at all that getting words out of him was like pulling teeth with a monkey-wrench. Every time I asked him a new question he flushed, bobbed his Adam’s apple, and contorted his face in a wince of agony. He was speechless for several minutes after he had listened to the commercial and I had asked him, “How did you like the commercial? Very Much; Only Moderately; or Not Very Much?” At last he managed to whisper, feebly, “Yes.”

I had now only two more interviews to get. I decided to skip the next few houses and go to the square apartment building. I got in by the usual method, pressing all the buttons at once until some deluded soul released the inner door.

The coolness was a relief. I went up a short flight of stairs whose carpeting was just beginning to wear thin, and knocked at the first door, which was numbered Six. I found this curious because from its position it should have been numbered One.

Nothing happened when I knocked. I knocked again more loudly, waited, and was about to go on to the next apartment when the door swung inward noiselessly and I found myself being looked at by a young boy whom I judged to be about fifteen.

He rubbed one of his eyes with a finger, as if he had just got up. He was cadaverously thin; he had no shirt on, and the ribs stuck out like those of an emaciated figure in a medieval woodcut. The skin stretched over them was nearly colourless, not white but closer to the sallow tone of old linen. His feet were bare; he was wearing only a pair of khaki pants. The eyes, partly hidden by a rumpled mass of straight black hair that came down over the forehead, were obstinately melancholy, as though he was assuming the expression on purpose.

We stared at each other. He was evidently not going to say anything, and I could not quite begin. The questionnaires I was carrying had suddenly become unrelated to anything at all, and at the same time obscurely threatening. Finally I managed to say, feeling very synthetic as I did so, “Hello there, is your father in?”

He continued to stare at me without a tremor of expression. “No. He’s dead,” he said.

“Oh.” I stood, swaying a little; the contrast with the heat outside had made me dizzy. Time seemed to have shifted into slow motion; there seemed to be nothing to say; but I couldn’t leave or move. He continued to stand in the doorway.

Then after what seemed hours it occurred to me that he might not actually be as young as he looked. There were dark circles under his eyes, and some fine thin lines at the outer corners.