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"I beg your pardon?" said Susanna. She drew her newspapers about herself protectively.

"I saw you come down the street like you were a circus parade, and I just wondered who you thought you were," said Fuller.

Susanna blushed gloriously. "I—I’m an actress," she said.

"You can say that again," said Fuller. "Greatest actresses in the world, American women."

"You’re very nice to say so," said Susanna uneasily.

Fuller’s skin glowed brighter and hotter. His mind had become a fountain of apt, intricate phrases. "I’m not talking about theaters with seats in ’em. I’m talking about the stage of life. American women act and dress like they’re gonna give you the world. Then, when you stick out your hand, they put an ice cube in it."

"They do?" said Susanna emptily.

"They do," said Fuller, "and it’s about time somebody said so." He looked challengingly from spectator to spectator, and found what he took to be dazed encouragement. "It isn’t fair," he said.

"What isn’t?" said Susanna, lost.

"You come in here with bells on your ankles, so’s I’ll have to look at your ankles and your pretty pink feet," said Fuller. "You kiss the cat, so’s I’ll have to think about how it’d be to be that cat," said Fuller. "You call an old man an angel, so’s I’ll have to think about what it’d be like to be called an angel by you," said Fuller. "You hide your key in front of everybody, so’s I’ll have to think about where that key is," said Fuller.

He stood. "Miss," he said, his voice full of pain, "you do everything you can to give lonely, ordinary people like me indigestion and the heeby-jeebies, and you wouldn’t even hold hands with me to keep me from falling off a cliff."

He strode to the door. All eyes were on him. Hardly anyone noticed that his indictment had reduced Susanna to ashes of what she’d been moments before. Susanna now looked like what she really was—a muddle-headed nineteen-year-old clinging to a tiny corner of sophistication.

"It isn’t fair," said Fuller. "There ought to be a law against girls acting and dressing like you do. It makes more people unhappy than it does happy. You know what I say to you, for going around making everybody want to kiss you?"

"No," piped Susanna, every fuse in her nervous system blown.

"I say to you what you’d say to me, if I was to try and kiss you," said Fuller grandly. He swung his arms in an umpire’s gesture for "out." "The hell with you," he said. He left, slamming the screen door.

He didn’t look back when the door slammed again a moment later, when the patter of running bare feet and the wild tinkling of little bells faded away in the direction of the firehouse.

That evening, Corporal Fuller’s widowed mother put a candle on the table, and fed him sirloin steak and strawberry shortcake in honor of his homecoming. Fuller ate the meal as though it were wet blotting paper, and he answered his mother’s cheery questions in a voice that was dead.

"Aren’t you glad to be home?" said his mother, when they’d finished their coffee.

"Sure," said Fuller.

"What did you do today?" she said.

"Walked," he said.

"Seeing all your old friends?" she said.

"Haven’t got any friends," said Fuller.

His mother threw up her hands. "No friends?" she said. "You?"

"Times change, ma," said Fuller heavily. "Eighteen months is a long time. People leave town, people get married —"

"Marriage doesn’t kill people, does it?" she said.

Fuller didn’t smile. "Maybe not," he said. "But it makes it awful hard for ’em to find any place to fit old friends in."

"Dougie isn’t married, is he?"

"He’s out west, ma—with the Strategic Air Command," said Fuller. The little dining room became as lonely as a bomber in the thin, cold stratosphere.

"Oh," said his mother. "There must be somebody left."

"Nope," said Fuller. "I spent the whole morning on the phone, ma. I might as well have been back in Korea. Nobody home."

"I can’t believe it," she said. "Why, you couldn’t walk down Main Street without being almost trampled by friends."

"Ma," said