A look of confusion on her face: "I don't understand. What are you saying? I should just quit-or what?"

"I mean we should seriously sit down and think about what we're doing, the kind of life we have-"

At that instant there was a loud, high-pitched shriek from the nursery, of just that timbre that turns parental blood to transmission fluid. They both sprang up, crashing into each other like the Three Stooges exiting a ballroom, and raced down the hallway, Marlene in the lead.

Lucy was standing in front of her bed, red-faced, in hysterics.

Marlene knelt to embrace her, but the child shook away from her and backed away toward the bed.

"What's wrong, baby! Calm down and tell Mommy what's wrong," cooed Marlene, heart in throat.

Karp, trained observer that he was, said, "It's her foot." The child had all her weight on her left leg, with only the toes of her bare right foot touching the floor. Marlene lifted her thrashing, sobbing daughter and grabbed at her ankle. She inspected the foot and cursed. "Christ, she's got another splinter."

"No needuh! No needuh!" yelled Lucy.

"Baby, please calm down! Mommy has to take it out. You don't want an infection, do you?"

"Nooooo! No neee-duh!"

"Hold her," said Marlene, after which ensued Karp's absolutely least favorite paternal chore, that of clamping in a viselike grip the wriggling, choking, screaming, red-faced, snot-bubbling changeling his darling had become, while its mother probed the splinter out with a flame-sterilized number two sharp.

And after that necessary torment, Lucy extracted the maximum of cosseting, as being only her due. After a fretful supper there were multiple tuckings in, expeditions for milk and cookies, story after story read, cramp-backed sittings by the little bed-in short, all the forms of torture imposed upon guilty, loving parents by their innocent young.