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Gloria shook her head. “Boy—” she said, “what a lothy mitherable minithter you’re going to be! You don’t believe anything! I pity you.”

And she left.

George had another dream about Gloria St. Pierre that night—Gloria with the lisp this time, Gloria with the teeth missing and the ankles in casts. It was the wildest dream yet. He was able to think of the dream with a certain wry humor. It didn’t embarrass him to have a body as well as a mind and a soul. He didn’t blame his body for wanting Gloria St. Pierre. It was a perfectly natural thing for a body to do.

When George went calling on her after breakfast, he imagined that his mind and soul weren’t involved in the least.

“Good morning,” she said to him. Many swellings had gone down. Her looks were improved—and she had a question all ready for him. This was it:

“If I wath to become a houthwife with many children, and the children were good,” she said to George, “would you rejoith?”

“Of course,” said George.

“That’th what I dreamed latht night,” she said. “I wath married to you, and we had bookth and children all over the houth.” She didn’t seem to admire the dream much—nor had it done anything to improve her opinion of George.

“Well—” said George, “I—I’m very flattered that you should dream of me.”

“Don’t be,” she said. “I have crathy dreamth all the time. Anyway, the dream latht night wath more about falth teeth than it wath about you.”

“False teeth?” said George.

“I had great big falth teeth,” she said. “Every time I tried to thay anything to you or the children, the falth teeth would fall out.”

“I’m sure false teeth can be made to fit better than that,” said George.

“Could you love thomebody with falth teeth?” she said.

“Certainly,” said George.

“When I athk you if you could love thomebody with falth teeth,” she said, “I hope you don’t think I’m athking you if you could love me. That itn’t what I’m athking.”

“Um,” said George.

“If we got married,” she said, “it wouldn’t latht. You wouldn’t get mad enough at me if I wath bad.”

There was a silence—a long one in which George finally came to understand her somewhat. She treated herself as worthless because no one had ever loved her enough to care if she was good or bad.

Since there was no one else to do it, she punished herself.

George came to understand, too, that he would be worthless as a minister as long as he didn’t get angry about what such people did to themselves. Blandness, shyness, forgiveness would not do.

She was begging him to care enough to get mad.

The world was begging him to care enough to get mad.

“Married or not,” he said, “if you continue to treat yourself like garbage and God’s sweet earth like a city dump, I hope with all my heart that you roast in hell.”

Gloria St. Pierre’s pleasure was luminous—profound.

George had never given that much pleasure to a woman or to himself before. And, in his innocence, he supposed that the next step had to be marriage.

He asked her to marry him. She accepted. It was a good marriage. It was the end of innocence for them both.

$10,000 A YEAR, EASY

“So you’re finally moving, eh?” said Gino Donnini. He was a small, fierce-looking man, who had once been a brilliant operatic tenor. His brilliance was gone now, and, in his sixties, he gave voice lessons in order to pay for his cluttered apartment under mine, a little food and wine, and expensive cigars. “One by one my young friends are going. How will I stay young now?”

“I’d think you’d be glad to get somebody upstairs who wasn’t tone-deaf.”

“Aaaaaah—you make fine music inside. What’s that book there?”

“I was just cleaning out our storage locker, Maestro, and found my old high-school annual.” I opened the book to the checkerboard of faces and brief biographies that was the section devoted to the hundred and fifty seniors that year. “See how I’ve failed? They predicted I’d be a great novelist someday, and here I go to work for the telephone company as a maintenance engineer.”

“Aha,” said Gino, examining