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hers, and her mother had no right to know things about him that she didn’t know.
    “You shut up,” she said fiercely. “I married who I wanted to marry. Why would you say that? You always detested him and you know it. You even liked Flap better than you liked Danny.”
    “I certainly never cared for Daniel’s attire,” Aurora said placidly, ignoring her daughter’s anger. “That much is undeniable. He dressed even worse than Thomas, which is hardly conceivable. Still, facts are facts. He’s proven himself a man of accomplishment, and Thomas has not. It may be that you chose unwisely.”
    “Don’t say that to me!” Emma yelled. “You don’t know anything about it. At least I chose! I didn’t let five or six men trail me around for years, like you’re doing. Why are you criticizing me? You can’t make up your mind about anything!”
    Aurora promptly hung up. There was clearly no point in continuing the conversation until Emma had had time to cool off. Besides, André Previn had just stepped onto the Today show and André Previn was one of the few men alive to whom she immediately yielded her undivided attention. Vulgarly put, she was mad for him. For the Today show he was wearing a polka dot shirt and a broad tie, and he twinkled and kept his dignity at the same time. Aurora sipped her coffee and had another cruller while hanging on to his every word. The crullers came to her airmail every week in a white box from Crutchley’s of Southampton, the gift of her second-dullest suitor, Mr. Edward Johnson, the vice-president of her bank. Edward Johnson’s only redeeming feature was that he had grown up in Southampton and knew about Crutchley’s; arranging for her weekly package of crullers was, as far as Aurora knew, the most imaginative thing he had ever done in his life.
    André Previn was a fish of another water. He was so adorable that at moments Aurora found herself envying his wife. A man who possessed both dignity and a twinkle was a rare find—it was a combination for which she herself seemed fated to look in vain. Her husband Rudyard, through no fault of his own, had had neither. The very fact that his name was Rudyard was no fault of his own; his ridiculous mother had never gotten over a schoolgirlcrush on Rudyard Kipling. Indeed, looking back on her twenty-four years of marriage to Rudyard—something, admittedly, that she seldom did—Aurora could not remember a single thing that had been his fault, unless it was Emma, and even that was questionable. Rudyard had been without the slightest capacity for insistence; he had not even insisted that they marry. A plant could not have been easier to relate to, or less exciting. All he really needed was a tub of water to soak in at night—Aurora had often told him as much, and he had always agreed. Fortunately, he had also been tall, handsome, beautifully mannered, and possessed of a patent on a minor chemical for which the oil industry paid him comfortable sums of money. Had it not been for the minor chemical, Aurora felt quite sure they would have starved; Rudyard had been much too well mannered to hold a job. His approach to existence had been to decline comment whenever possible; if he had a genius for anything it was for minimums. Even while he was alive Aurora had sometimes found herself forgetting that he was alive, and then one day, without a word to anyone, he had sat down in a lawn chair and died. Once he was dead, even his picture didn’t serve to call him to mind. Twenty-four years of minimums had left her only a scattering of usable memories, and, in any case, in her heart of hearts she had long since given herself up to thoughts of others—singers, usually. If she were ever forced to put up with a man again she intended to see to it that he could at least make noise.
    André Previn’s great appeal was that he was both musical and dimply. Aurora herself was devoted to the Bach Society. She watched him closely, determined to get some fresh