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"Little creature, form'd of Joy & Mirth,

Go love without the help of any Thing on Earth."

At the foot of the stairs, written in pencil on the wall, by the Senator himself, was the Senator's rebuttal, another poem by Blake:

Love seeketh only Self to please, To bind another to Its delight, Joys in another's loss of ease, And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite.

Back in Washington, Eliot's father was wishing out loud that he and Eliot were both dead.

"I—I have a rather primitive idea," said McAllister.

"The last primitive idea you had cost me control of eighty-seven million dollars."

McAllister indicated with a tired smile that he wasn't about to apologize for the design of the Foundation. It had, after all, done exactly what it was meant to do, had handed the fortune from father to son, without the tax collector's getting a dime. McAllister could scarcely have guaranteed that the son would be conventional. "I should like to propose that Eliot and Sylvia make one last try for a reconciliation."

Sylvia shook her head. "No," she whispered. "I'm sorry. No." She was curled in a great wingchair. She had taken off her shoes. Her face was a flawless blue-white oval, her hair raven black. There were circles under her eyes. "No."

This was, of course, a medical decision, and a wise one, too. Her second breakdown and recovery had not turned her back into the old Sylvia of the early Rosewater County days. It had given her a distinctly new personality, the third since her marriage to Eliot. The core of this third personality was a feeling of worthlessness, of shame at being revolted by the poor and by Eliot's personal hygiene, and a suicidal wish to ignore her revulsions, to get back to Rosewater, to very soon die in a good cause.

So it was with self-conscious, medically-prescribed, superficial opposition to total sacrifice that she said again, "No."

The Senator swept Eliot's picture from the mantelpiece. "Who can blame her? One more roll in the hay with that drunk gypsy I call son?" He apologized for the coarseness of this last image. "Old men without hope have a tendency to be both crude and accurate. I beg your pardon."

Sylvia put her lovely head down, raised it again. "I don't think of him as that—as a drunk gypsy."

"I do, by God. Every time I'm forced to look at him I think to myself, 'What a staging area for a typhoid epidemic!' Don't try to spare my feelings, Sylvia. My son doesn't deserve a decent woman. He deserves what he's got, the sniveling camaraderie of whores, malingerers, pimps, and thieves."

"They're not that bad, Father Rosewater."

"As I understand it, that's their chief appeal to Eliot, that there's absolutely nothing good about them."

Sylvia, with two nervous breakdowns behind her, and with no well-formed dreams before her, said quietly, just as her doctor would have wanted her to, "I don't want to argue."

"You still could argue on Eliot's behalf?"

"Yes. If I don't make anything else clear tonight, at least let me make that clear: Eliot is right to do what he's doing. It's beautiful what he's doing. I'm simply not strong enough or good enough to be by his side any more. The fault is mine."

Pained mystification, and then helplessness, suffused the Senator's face. "Tell me one good thing about those people Eliot helps."

"I can't."

"I thought not."

"It's a secret thing," she said, forced to argue, pleading for the argument to stop right there.

Without any notion of how merciless he was being, the Senator pressed on. "You're among friends now—suppose you tell us what this great secret is."

"The secret is that they're human," said Sylvia. She looked from face to face for some flicker of understanding. There was none. The last face into which she peered was Norman Mushari's. Mushari gave her a hideously inappropriate smile of greed and fornication.

Sylvia excused herself abruptly, went into the bathroom and wept.

Thunder was heard in Rosewater now, caused a brindle dog to come scrambling out of the firehouse with psychosomatic rabies. The dog stopped in the