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She was treated in Switzerland. She was discharged six months later, silent and sad, almost unbearably deep again. Eliot and the pitiful people of Rosewater County again had a place in her consciousness. She wished to return to them, not out of yearning but out of a sense of duty. Her doctor warned her that a return might be fatal. He told her to remain in Europe, to divorce Eliot, and to build a quiet, meaningful life of her own.

So, very civilized divorce proceedings were begun, stage-managed by McAllister, Robjent, Reed and McGee.

Now it was time for Sylvia to fly to America for the divorce. And a meeting was held on a June evening in the Washington, D.C., apartment of Eliot's father, Senator Lister Ames Rosewater. Eliot was not there. He would not leave Rosewater County. Present were the Senator, Sylvia, Thurmond McAllister, the ancient lawyer, and his watchful young aide, Mushari.

The tone of the meeting was frank, sentimental, forgiving, sometimes hilarious, and fundamentally tragic always. There was brandy.

"In his heart," said the Senator, swirling his snifter, "Eliot doesn't love those awful people out there any more than I do. He couldn't possibly love them, if he weren't drunk all the time. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: This is basically a booze problem. If Eliot's booze were shut off, his compassion for the maggots in the slime on the bottom of the human garbage pail would vanish."

He clapped his hands, shook his old head. "If only there had been a child!" He was a product of St. Paul's and Harvard, but it pleased him to speak with the split-banjo twang of a Rosewater County hog farmer. He tore off his steel-rimmed spectacles, stared at his daughter-in-law with suffering blue eyes. "If only! If only!" He put his spectacles back on, spread his hands in resignation. The hands were as speckled as boxturtles. "The end of the Rosewater family is now plainly in view."

"There are other Rosewaters," McAllister suggested gently.

Mushari squirmed, for he meant to represent those others soon.

"I'm talking about real Rosewaters!" cried the Senator bitterly. "The hell with Pisquontuit!" Pisquontuit, Rhode Island, a seaside resort, was where the only other branch of the family lived.

"A buzzard feast, a buzzard feast," the Senator moaned, writhing in a masochistic fantasy of how the Rhode Island Rosewaters would pick the Indiana Rosewaters' bones. He coughed hackingly. The cough embarrassed him. He was a chain-smoker, like his son.

He went to the mantelpiece, glared at a colored photograph of Eliot there. The picture had been taken at the end of the Second World War. It showed a much-decorated captain of the Infantry. "So clean, so tall, so purposeful—so clean, so clean!" He gnashed his crockery teeth. "What a noble mind is here o'erthrown!"

He scratched himself, though he did not itch. "How puffy and pasty he looks these days. I've seen healthier complexions on rhubarb pies! Sleeps in his underwear, eats a balanced diet of potato chips, Southern Comfort, and Rosewater Golden Lager Ambrosia Beer." He rattled his fingernails against the photograph. "Him! Him! Captain Eliot Rosewater—Silver Star, Bronze Star, Soldier's Medal, and Purple Heart with Cluster! Sailing champion! Ski champion! Him! Him! My God—the number of times life has said, 'Yes, yes, yes,' to him! Millions of dollars, hundreds of significant friends, the most beautiful, intelligent, talented, affectionate wife imaginable! A splendid education, an elegant mind in a big, clean, body—and what is his reply when life says nothing but, 'Yes, yes, yes'?

" 'No, no, no.'

"Why? Will someone tell me why?"

No one did.

"I had a female cousin one time—a Rockefeller, as it happened—" said the Senator, "and she confessed to me that she spent the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth years of her life saying nothing but, 'No, thank you.' Which is all very well for a girl of that age and station. But it would have been a damned unattractive trait in a male Rockefeller, and an even more unsuitable one, if