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gets cold. He'd have spent half an hour over a 'Scotch and soda.
    While we were getting the coffee ready, I found time to ask, "Have you remembered anything?"
    "Yes," she said.
    "Tell me."
    "I don't mean I know what was in the pill. Just ... I can do things I couldn't do before. I think my way of thinking has changed. Ed, I'm worried-"
    "Worried?"
    She got the words out in a rush. "It feels like I've been falling in love with you for a very long time. But I haven't. Why should I feel that way so suddenly?"
    The bottom dropped out of my stomach. I'd had thoughts like this ... and put them out of my mind, and when they came back I did it again. I couldn't afford to fall in love. It would cost too much. It would hurt too much.
    "It's been like this all day. It scares me, Ed. Suppose I feel like this about every man? What if the Monk thought I'd make a good call girl?"
    I laughed much harder than I should have. Louise was getting really angry before I was able to stop.
    "Wait a minute," I said. "Are you in love with Bill Morris too?"
    "No, of course not!"
    "Then forget the call girl bit. He's got more money than I do. A call girl would love him more, if she loved anyone, which she wouldn't, because call girls are generally frigid."
    "How do you know?" she demanded.
    "I read it in a magazine."
    Louise began to relax. I began to see how tense she really had been. "All right," she said, "but that means I really am in love with you."
    I pushed the crisis away from us. "Why didn't you ever get married?"
    "Oh . . ." She was going to pass it off, but she changed her mind. "Every man I dated wanted to sleep with me. I thought that was wrong, so-"
    She looked puzzled. "Why did I think that was wrong?"
    "Way you were brought up."
    "Yes, but.. ." She trailed off.
    "How do you feel about it flow?"
    "Well, I wouldn't sleep with anyone, but if a man was worth dating he might be worth marrying, and if he was worth marrying he'd certainly be worth sleeping with, wouldn't he? And I'd be crazy to marry someone I hadn't slept with, wouldn't I?"
    "I did."
    "And look how that turned out! Oh, Ed, I'm sorry. But you did bring it up."
    "Yah," I said, breathing shallow.
    "But I used to feel that way too. Something's changed?'
    We hadn't been talking fast. There had been pauses, gaps, and we had worked through them. I had had time to eat three slices of pizza. Louise had had time to wrestle with her conscience, lose, and eat one.
    Only she hadn't done it. There was the pizza, staring at her, and she hadn't given it a look or a smell. For Louise, that was unusual.
    Half-joking, I said, "Try this as a theory. Years ago you must have sublimated your sex urge into an urge for food. Either that or the rest of us sublimated our appetites into a sex urge, and you didn't."
    "Then the pill un-sublimated me, hmm?" She looked thoughtfully at the pizza. Clearly its lure was gone. "That's what I mean. I didn't used to be able to outstare a pizza."
    "Those olive eyes."
    "Hypnotic, they were."
    "A good call girl should be able to keep herself in shape." Immediately I regretted saying it. It wasn't funny. "Sorry," I said.
    "It's all right." She picked up a tray of candles in red glass vases and moved away, depositing the candles on the small square tables. She moved with grace and beauty through the twilight of the Long Spoon, her hips swaying just enough to avoid the sharp corners of tables.
    I'd hurt her. But she'd known me long enough; she must know I had foot-in-mouth disease...
    I had seen Louise before and known that she was beautiful. But it seemed to me that she had never been beautiful with so little excuse.
    She moved back by the same route, lighting the candles as she went. Finally she put the tray down, leaned across the bar and said, "I'm sorry. I can't joke about it when I don't know."
    "Stop worrying, will you? Whatever the Monk fed you, he was trying to help you."
    "I love you."
    "What?"
    "I love you."
    "Okay. I love you too." I use those words so seldom