“He can have the courtesy of the house anytime,” said Fauna.

“I don’t mean that,” said Mack. “He needs a dame around. He needs a dame to fight with. Why, that can keep a guy so goddam busy defending himself he ain’t got no time to blame himself.”

Fauna regarded marriage with a benevolent eye. Not only was it a desirable social condition, but it sent her some of her best customers.

“Well, let’s marry him off,” said Fauna.

“Oh no,” said Mack. “I wouldn’t go that far. My God! Not Doc!”

Doc tried to solve his problem in the ancient way. He took a long, leisurely trip to La Jolla, four hundred miles south. He traveled in the old manner, with lots of beer and a young lady companion whose interest in invertebrate zoology Doc thought might be flexible—and it was.

The whole trip was a success: weather calm and warm, tides low. Under the weed-wreathed boulders of the intertidal zone Doc found, by great good fortune, twenty-eight baby octopi with tentacles four or five inches long. It was a little bonanza for him if he could keep them alive. He handled them tenderly, put them in a wooden collecting bucket, and floated seaweed over them for protection. An excitement was growing in him.

His companion began to be a little disappointed. Doc’s enthusiasm for the octopi indicated that he was not as flexible as she. And no girl likes to lose center stage, particularly to an octopus. The four-hundred-mile trip back to Monterey was made in a series of short dashes, for Doc stopped every few miles to dampen the sack that covered the collecting bucket.

“Octopi can’t stand heat,” he said.

He recited no poetry to her. The subject of her eyes, her feelings, her skin, her thought, did not come up. Instead Doc told her about octopi—a subject that would have fascinated her two days before.