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traffic drifted down from a comparatively dark and cluttered world.
    Jack Fredericks paid his visit the very next day. He thumped down the stairs in his little scholar’s gown and stared at the still life over Robin’s shoulder and asked, “Why are you going to grind onions in a mortar?”
    “We’re not,” she replied in the haughty voice Leonard had first heard.
    Jack sauntered over to the hermaphrodite and said, “Good Lord. What happened to
him?
”
    Leonard made no earnest effort to put him at his ease. Embarrassed and hence stubborn, Jack lay down on the shallow ledge designed to set off the exhibits, in a place just behind the table supporting the still life, and smiled up quizzically at the faces of the painters. He meant to look debonair, but in the lambent atmosphere he looked ponderous, with all that leather and wool. The impression of mass was so intense Leonard feared he might move and break one of the casts. Leonard had not noticed on the street how big his fellow West Virginian had grown. The weight was mostly in flesh—broad beefy hands folded on his vest, corpulent legs uneasily crossed on the cold stone floor.
    Seabright made no pretense of not being startled at finding him there. “What, uh, what are you doing?”
    “I guess I’m auditing.”
    The telltale “guess” put the Puss’s back up higher. “We don’t generally set aside space for spectators.”
    “Oh, I’ve been very unobtrusive, sir. We haven’t been saying a word to each other.”
    “Be that as it may, you’re right in these people’s vision. If you didn’t come down here to look at the statues, I’m really afraid there’s nothing here for you.”
    “Oh. Well. Certainly.” Jack, grimacing with the effort, raised his body to his feet. “I didn’t know there were all these regulations.”
    Leonard did not strenuously follow up this victory. His courtship of Robin continued as subtly as before, though twice he did dare ask her to the movies. The second time, she accepted. The delicately tinted Japanese love tale, so queerly stained with murders, seemed to offer a mutually foreign ground where they might meet as equals, but the strict rules of the girls’ house where she stayed, requiring them to scamper directly into a jammed bus, made the whole outing, in the end, seem awkward and foolish. He much preferred the days, full of light and time, when their proximity had the grace of the accidental and before their eyes a constant topic of intercourse was poised. He even wondered if through their one date he hadn’t lost some dignity in her eyes. The tone of her talk to him in the Well was respectful; the more so since his painting was coming excellently. Something in those spherical shapes and mild colors spoke to him. Seabright was plainly flattered by his progress. “Mmm,” he would purr, “delicious tones on the shadow side here. But I believe you’re shading a bit too much towards red. It’s really a very distinct violet, you know. If I could have your palette a moment … And a clean brush?” Lesson by lesson, Leonard was drawn into Seabright’s world, a tender, subdued world founded on violet, and where violet—pronounced “vaalet”—at the faintest touch of a shadow, at the slightest hesitation of red or blue, rose to thesurface, shyly vibrant. Robin’s bluntly polychrome vision caused him to complain, “Really, Miss Cox, I wish you had got the drawing correct before you began filling in the spaces.” When Puss had gone back up the spiral stair, Robin would transfer his vexation to Leonard as “Honestly, Len, I can’t see all this rotten purple. You’d think my onions were grapes, to see what he’s done to them. Tell me, should I scrape his paint right off?”
    Leonard walked around to her easel and suggested, “Why don’t you try keying in the rest of it around them?”
    “Key it in? Key it in!” She seemed to relish the shrill syllables.
    “Sure. Make your cabbage kind of greeny-purple, and