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me about the suit and the walking and all?"
    "Oh, no," she said. "I only discovered them."
    "A sort of test."
    "Perhaps. I don't know." She seemed surprised by the suggestion. She took from her breast pocket, where a neat and useless handkerchief was pinned, a brown cigarette, and lit it with a kitchen match she struck on her sole. She wore a light dress of the sort of print proper to old ladies, though Smoky thought he had never seen one quite so intensely blue-green, or one with leaves, tiny flowers, vines, so intricately intertwined: as though cut from the whole day. "I think prophylactic, though, on the whole."
    "Hm?"
    "For your own safety."
    "Ah, I see." They sat in silence awhile, Great-aunt Cloud's a calm and smiling silence, his expectant; he wondered why he wasn't taken within, introduced; he was conscious of the heat rising from his shirt's open neck; he realized it was Sunday. He cleared his throat. "Dr. and Mrs. Drinkwater at church?"
    "Why, in a sense, yes." It was odd the way she responded to everything he said as though it were a notion that had never occurred to her before. "Are you religious?"
    He had been afraid of this. "Well," he began.
    "The women tend to be more so, don't you think?"
    "I guess. No one I grew up with cared much about it."
    "My mother and I felt it far more strongly than my father, or my brothers. Though they suffered from it, perhaps, more than we."
    He had no answer for this, and couldn't tell if her close inspection of him just then awaited one, or didn't, or was merely short sight.
    "My nephew also—Dr. Drinkwater—well of course there are the animals, which he does pay close attention to. He pays very close attention there. The rest seems to pass him by."
    "A pantheist, sort of?"
    "Oh no. He's not that foolish. It just seems to"—she moved her cigarette in the air—"pass him by. Ah, who's here?"
    A woman in a large picture hat had turned in at the gate on a bicycle. She wore a blouse, printed like Cloud's but more patent, and a pair of large jeans. She dismounted inexpertly and took a wooden bucket from the bike's basket; when she tilted her picture hat back, Smoky recognized Mrs. Drinkwater. She came up and sat heavily on the steps. "Cloud," she said, "that is forever the last time I will ever ask you for advice about berrying again."
    "Mr. Barnable and I," said Cloud merrily, "were discussing religion."
    "Cloud," said Mrs. Drinkwater darkly, scratching her ankle above a slip-on sneaker frayed about the big toe, "Cloud, I was led astray."
    "Your bucket is full."
    "I was led astray. The bucket, hell, I filled that the first ten minutes I got there."
    "Well. There you are."
    "You didn't say I would be led astray."
    "I didn't ask."
    There was a pause then. Cloud smoked. Mrs. Drinkwater dreamily scratched her ankle. Smoky (who didn't mind not being greeted by Mrs. Drinkwater; in fact hadn't noticed it; that comes from growing up anonymous) had time to wonder why Cloud hadn't said 
you didn't ask
. "As for religion," Mrs. Drinkwater said, "ask Auberon."
    "Ah. There you see. Not a religious man." To Smoky: "My older brother."
    "It's all he thinks about," Mrs. Drinkwater said.
    "Yes," Cloud said thoughtfully, "yes. Well, there it is, you see."
    "Are you religious?" Mrs. Drinkwater asked Smoky.
    "He's not," Cloud said. "Of course there was August."
    "I didn't have a religious childhood," Smoky said. He grinned. "I guess I was sort of a polytheist."
    "What?" said Mrs. Drinkwater.
    "The Pantheon. I had a classical education."
    "You have to start somewhere," she replied, picking leaves and small bugs from her bucket of berries. "This should be 
nearly
 the last of the foul things. Tomorrow's Midsummer Day, thank it all."
    "My brother August," Cloud said, "Alice's grandfather, he was perhaps religious. He left. For parts unknown."
    "A missionary?" Smoky asked.
    "Why yes," Cloud said, again seeming newly struck with the idea. "Yes, maybe so."
    "They must be dressed by now," Mrs. Drinkwater