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he expected to be tolerant of this as well?
    Fortunately he had lived long enough to know that the best defense against any moral outrage is patience; wait a moment and something will change: the outrage, he who committed it, or, most often, oneself.
    Grace laughed curtly. “Head and heart!” she said. “I’m always the businesswoman.”
    Reinhart chuckled in relief: so that was the bifurcation.
    Grace said: “Mind giving me your credentials?”
    He cleared his throat. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about, Grace.”
    “This cooking of yours. Where were you trained?”
    Could he have heard her correctly? No one ever wanted to hear him on his favorite subject!
    “Well,” said he, swinging himself from a seat to a luxurious full-length stretch on the bed, “I have never taken a lesson in cookery. Years ago, when I was first married and my wife would be under the weather, I’d do a turn in the kitchen and maybe take one of those recipes off a can of something. You know, like the tuna casserole that is sometimes on a noodle box, or vice versa. Then—”
    “Carl,” Grace interrupted, “my idea was not to take you from grilled cheese to gourmet grub with all the steps between. The point is, you seem pretty knowledgeable about the subject. How?”
    “Diligence,” said Reinhart, “and caring.”
    “Come on, Carl,” Grace said impatiently, “I’m in earnest: I’ll tell you why in a minute, but first I want your story, as precise as you can make it.”
    Reinhart might have taken umbrage at her manner (where’d she get off, being so high and mighty, now?) had the subject not been that which was, after Winona, the dearest to him.
    “One improves through trial and error,” said he, “but the techniques can be learned easily enough, some of them on the TV cooking shows and others from books, those that take you through a recipe detail by detail, allowing for the pitfalls, like Julia Child’s, who is a genius as a teacher, and Michael Field’s, and Gourmet and other periodicals, including the ladies’ magazines that once recommended only the tuna casseroles. Now they’ll tell you how to make bouillabaisse and quiche and moussaka.”
    “Uh-huh,” said Grace. “And you’ve only worked at home? You haven’t cooked in a restaurant?”
    “Never. I’ve never even thought of doing any professional work. I really cook for the love of it—and I use the word advisedly. Winona”—for a moment he had forgotten the situation; now he felt strange about pronouncing the name to her friend —“my daughter hardly touches her meals.” Though apparently she gorged on high-calorie ice cream with her friend.
    “Carl, none of that serves my point,” Grace said rudely. “I’m not interested in the personal here, but rather in the public. You know Epicon, my firm. We’re expanding in the gourmet area. It’s my theory that we’re missing some big bucks unless we reach the people who eat fancy food. This is no small market. One way to escape the label of ‘just a housewife,’ which is about as popular nowadays as yellow fever, is to be at least a gourmet cook. Not to mention the growing number of guys like yourself who stay home and fix meals for the breadwinner. Isn’t it true that though men were traditionally supposed to be meat-and-potato eaters exclusively, still, when they cook, they often make Cordon Bleu dishes?” She answered herself: “You know they do.”
    “So I’ve heard,” said Reinhart, “but I’m no authority: I don’t get around much any more, frankly.”
    “And that’s another thing, Carl. I think you should get out of that apartment more often.” Grace became positively avuncular. He could imagine her winking and digging him with her elbow, were he near enough. “Be better for Winnie, take my word for it.”
    What Reinhart found most outrageous here was that she would use his interest in cooking to promote her selfish plans to lure away his daughter.
    “Grace,” he