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which the pale, clear, lemon yellow he was thinking of (African marigold, carnation-flowered, yellow supreme) was likely to be confused with the orange of French marigold or of cosmos orange flare, a vision in which energy and whopping good intentions counted for more than anything else and the bigger a flower the better—but nevertheless a vision, an ideal of beauty, of love and the lavish hand; and the sense of his loss, his large, vague loss, overwhelmed and engulfed her own.
    She pressed his hand lightly, murmuring, “Yes, I remember,” and then let his fingers drop. He regained her hand, however, and squeezed it. She felt, as once before in the fields, that he was on the verge of some fine avowal. She herself, only now, had made the great leap from pity to sympathy; she grieved for his predicament, of which she herself was the determining factor; could he likewise grieve for hers, whose existence he had never acknowledged, weep with her at last because she could not leave him, because the courage, the more attractive alternative, whatever it was that might separate them, was lacking? “I’ve always loved your flowers,” he said, his voice blurred and high with emotion. “You know that.”
    As her ears admitted this lie, this tearful, sentimental, brazen lie, her whole nature rose weakly in rebellion. How dare you, her heart muttered, how dare you say it? Nothing could have been—and at such a moment!—more dishonest; she could have cited him fifty instances which would have controverted him utterly. But the heartfelt insincerity of these words went beyond contradiction, beyond hypocrisy, into regions of spiritual obstinacy and opacity impenetrable to reason, where reason, in fact, and conscience had been cruelly blinded by the will, the will which demanded that everything should be always all right, which had, as it were, legislated the bouquet on the mantelpiece by a kind of brutal denial of color, of tonal values, of the harmony of textures, and which was now enforcing its myth of a harmonious marriage, of tastes and occupations shared, by dictatorial fiat.
    And yet there had been the tears in the voice…What the tears meant, she perceived, was that he did love the flowers, now that she had not got them, now that they were no longer dangerous; they had passed, for him and for her, out of experience into memory, and here in this twilight world he could possess them—and her—with a terrible blind rapacity. She saw also that her pity had been wasted, that he had got her where he wanted her; she had been translated, bodily, into that realm of shadows where the will was all-powerful, the city of the dead. She herself was no more to him now than an oak leaf pressed in a schoolbook, a tendril of blond hair, a garter kept in a drawer. But this was, for him, everything: it was love and idolatry. The lie was a necessity to him, a cardinal article of faith. To protest was useless. He could not be shaken in his conviction, but only be annoyed, confused, thrown off. And in a final thrust of rejection, she yielded, conceding him everything—flowers, facts, truth. Let him put them into his authorized version; she had failed them, and would do so again and again. With him, they would see service.
    She tightened her clasp on his hand.
    “Yes,” she said mistily, “I know.”
    The lie came easier, after all, than she would have thought.

The Friend of the Family
    H IS GREAT QUALIFICATION was that nobody liked him very much. That is, nobody liked him enough to make a point of him. Consequently, among the married couples he knew, he was universally popular. Since nobody cherished him, swore by him, quoted his jokes or his political prophecies, nobody else felt obliged to diminish him; on the contrary, the husbands or wives of his friends were always discovering in him virtues their partners had never noticed, and a husband who was notorious for detesting the whole imposing suite of his wife’s acquaintance would make an