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lowering the case with a clumsy crash.
    "Your driving, darling, leaves something to be desired."
    "Castrator!" he shouted merrily. "Isn't that the correct term, Mrs. Freud?"
    Frannie smiled. Then she peeled off her cashmere polo coat and dropped it in a soft heap on the floor.
    "Pick that up," Marc said. "A hundred and fifty bucks and God knows what for the upkeep."
    "A hundred and forty-nine ninety-five," she emended, "and the upkeep is negligible. I rarely get it cleaned. It looks chic-er dirty."
    "Pick it up," he said again, firmly.
    Obediently she bent to retrieve it and carried it out to the hall closet.
    "Hey," I called as she went through the door. "Your shirt's out in back." And did the falter in my voice get past my throat as clearly as I felt it within? Did anyone know, or notice? Frannie must have. For a second she stopped dead in her tracks. Then: "Oh, is it?" she asked offhandedly; and went on.
    When she returned, it was neatly tucked in.
    The chicken took ages, which mattered only because it gave Brad too much time to tank up. I was afraid we'd lose him to his usual alcoholic miasma; but he hung on for Marc's and Frannie's sake.
    After dinner Frannie, seeming intuitively aware of my conversation with Marc in her absence, made a large show of domesticity by washing all the dishes. Brad had, I suppose, expected me to tackle the clean-up by myself so that he could impress both Brownes in the livingroom with a recitation of slightly misquoted poetry. Obviously put out by Frannie's preference of K.P. he went upstairs for a nap, asking us to wake him when we were finished.
    We forgot him entirely until Frannie began browsing through the bookcase and found an old set of anagrams. She was delighted. A few years before she and Marc had spent three and four nights a week playing with a brilliant couple named Weinrick in Meade's Manor. The four of them had created a handbook of complicated and brain-busting rules and had wound up doing it for money. Within a year no less than several hundred dollars had changed hands.
    "Let's try it," I said, intrigued with the idea of clashing with experts.
    "Okay," Marc agreed. "But I warn you: I've had it with the Weinricks. At the first sign of bloodshed, I quit"
    "Pacifist!" she flung at him, proceeding to turn the letters face-down on the bridge table. "What's wrong with a little harmless expression of hostility? There are lots worse ways of fighting your dearly beloveds. Go on, Jo —get Brad."
    But I was already on my way back to the kitchen for the ice-bucket. "You get him," I said. "I'm going to need a drink to cut the tension!"
    "No —you," she said. "I'm not exactly practiced at arousing him from slumber."
    "A piercing shriek or a splash of cold water might do it," I told her.
    So she went up for him; and once again I became aware of the passage of time and felt that maybe I should have gone myself. Not that I had expected him to leap from bed at her first nudge. He was one of those people who awakened hard, if at all. Seven or eight minutes was not, then, an untoward interim. And anyhow, what was I so concerned about? The thing with the shirt? Ridiculous. Shirts do come untucked in the normal course moving about. And suspicion, piled up over the years, could become a disease. Besides, Frannie was too smart for him. Her aesthetic eye might well be caught by that lovely face of his; but, much as I hated to admit it, a girl would have to be pretty stupid to get tied up with Brad the way he was these days. I was —but then I had known him when he was young. He'd wanted a good many things in those years: dreamed about jobs abroad, South America, the Orient; life in villas and chateaux and pagodas. He'd had drive then: read a lot, thought a lot; held people spellbound when he talked. It was only later, I told myself, that things went flat on him somehow; that he lost the spark and slipped into weary, bleary mediocrity.
    Oh, no: Brad was not for Frannie. For all her wanting to break