Eric, after pondering, said cautiously, 'I want—'

'You don't know what you want, Sweetscent; every man involved in an unhappy marriage loses the metabiological capacity to know what he does want – it's been taken away from him. You're a smelly little shell, trying to do the correct thing but never quite making it because your miserable little long-suffering heart isn't in it. Look at you now! You've managed to squirm away from me.'

'Have not.'

'—So we're no longer touching physically. Especially thigh-wise. Oh, perish thighwise from the universe. But it is hard, is it not, to do it, to squirm away in such close quarters ... here in the lounge. And yet you've managed to do it, haven't you?'

To change the subject Eric said, 'I heard on TV last night that the quatreologist with the funny beard, that Professor Wald, is back from—'

'No. He's not Virgil's guest.'

'Marm Hastings, then?'

That Taoist spellbinding nut and crank and fool? You manufacturing a joke, Sweetscent? Is that it? You suppose Virgil would tolerate a marginal fake, that—' She made an obscene upward-jerking gesture with her thumb, at the same time grinning in a show of her white, clean and very impressive clear teeth. 'Maybe,' she said, 'it's lan Norse.'

'Who's he?' He had heard the name; it had a vaguely familiar sound to it, and he knew that in asking her he was making a tactical error; still he did it: this, if anything, was his weakness in regard to women. He led where they followed – sometimes. But more than once, especially at critical times in his life, in the major junctions, he followed guilelessly where they led.

Phyllis sighed. 'lan's firm makes all those shiny sterile new very expensive artificial organs you cleverly graft into rich dying people; you mean, doctor, you're not clear as to whom you're indebted?'