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though he knew each plant as a friend. But flowers and food were irrelevancies. He just liked to see plants and know he had a hand in raising them. He liked to discover what food a plant liked best and supply it. He liked the feeling of fatherhood.
    “I’ve won money, Shirabi,” said Godwin.
    “I expect that. I don’t expect the other. I don’t pay you to lose money.”
    “You don’t pay me at all!” Godwin said sharply. “Let’s not forget that.”
    “No. But as long as you’re here, you might as well do something for your keep. And I don’t include losing my money. You know I’m saving every minim. You know ways to avoid losing.”
    “My money, too,” Godwin said. He was sitting gingerly on a stool he had covered first, and was regarding his surroundings with distaste.
    There was an essential difference between Shirabi and Godwin: If they were both drinking cider and eating summer sausage, which I hope you will agree they both might do, and each dropped his piece of sausage between the cushions of his chair, both would fish for it among the trash. But they would assume different attitudes for their search, and they would search for different reasons.
    Shirabi turned around, straightening. “How did you lose?”
    “Why don’t you get rid of these weeds? I hate them.”
    “How did you lose?”
    “Or hold these meetings of yours elsewhere.”
    “How did you lose?”
    “He knew what I was doing and called me on it. No challenge. Just let me know he knew what I was doing. He knows Josiah’s Flambeau table is rigged, too. I had to stop, and he won after that.”
    Shirabi laughed. “No challenge? His type isn’t like that. No, you must have ducked, my fine gentleman.”
    “Don’t say that! I tell you that he didn’t press the point.”
    “Oh, didn’t he? Your reputation overwhelm him, did it?”
    “I can handle him if I need to. I told him so, in a roundabout fashion.”
    “I’m sure he was impressed.”
    Shirabi was startled as Godwin came abruptly off the stool and across the room. Before he could drop the formula mixing bottle he was holding and bring his hands up, Godwin had him by the throat and was bending him painfully back over the hard edge of the tank. A green frond batted him lightly across the nose.
    Tightly, exactly, word by word, Godwin said, “He did not challenge me.”
    With equal tightness, the result not of emotion but of a constricted throat, Shirabi said, “Look at your suit.”
    With sudden apprehension, Godwin loosed the darker man and stepped back, looking down at himself. He could feel the wetness even before he saw it. His entire front was darkening rapidly with the formula poured on it by Shirabi. His lip began to tremble and his face to darken with anger.
    The instant he was released, Shirabi ducked down, went under the tank and came up on the other side. With one clean motion be dipped his mixing bucket into the chemical sludge and brought it up at the ready.
    “You ruined my suit!”
    “That I did. I’m not one of your six a year, or whatever the count is. If I killed you, I wouldn’t even bother to remember it. Gentleman! ”
    Godwin made a movement toward the front of his suit.
    “Don’t bother,” Shirabi said. “You might kill me, but you’d get a bucket of chemicals in the face, and I guarantee you’d swallow half of it if I had to sit on your head and pour it down your throat.”
    After the briefest of hesitations, Godwin looked down at his suit again and the moment was over. That sort of fight needs momentum to turn deadly, and the momentum was gone.
    “If I ever got into a fight with you, I’d kill you,” Godwin said.
    However, Godwin was not certain of this. Though Shirabi might not share his pretensions and might even resent them, he was no less dangerous for his common clothes.
    Shirabi simply said, “Maybe. Maybe not.”
    Godwin had gone to considerable trouble to leave all commonness behind him, and it had never seemed fair that Shirabi