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evolution, there was a slightly different reaction. Instead of considering himself totally unfit and excluded, he began to match what he knew of himself against each of the sins he heard recounted. Could I do
that?
Could he ever gamble? Seduce? Steal, swear, assault, outwit? Always no and no and no, and the words in Ivy’s letter trailing across his clear conscience:
a very good man who couldn’t do a bad thing if he tried
.
    And then one day he saw the face of Hickenwaller’s friend go past his wicket—just that, a reminder. And belatedly, as all things did, the solution came to Lulu Llewellyn.
    He went to Miss Fisher and asked her, and she cried. Then she said yes, she would marry him. Then she cried again and said pathetically that she had made up her mind when she was eight years old that nobody would ever want her and she might as well face it.
    So they went down to City Hall and got a license, and three days later they were married. He chittered and jittered like the most eager of grooms. He was eager about something else than that which plagues most grooms, however, and it was more important—to him, at least.
    That very evening he marched to Ivy’s apartment and up the one flight of stairs. It made him feel a little strange to be knocking on the door instead of using his key, but somehow he felt that he should knock, that he owed her that courtesy. He waited happily, feeling the crackling comfort of the marriage license in his breast pocket.
    The door opened.
    “Lulu! Oh—Lulu, I’m so glad.” She looked worn, sallow-cheeked, but her eyes were shining. She pulled him inside and shut the dear. “I just knew you’d come back. I just knew you would, you had to.”
    He cleared his throat. “I …”
    “Don’t talk. Don’t say anything. I’ve had a chance to think things out clearly. And oh, Lulu, it’s all so senseless and I’m so sorry.”
    “But I didn’t …”
    “Don’t say another word. You’re going to listen to me now. I’vewaited too long. You just stay right there where you belong.”
    Half playfully but very firmly she nudged him over to his old chair and crowded him until he had to sit down.
    “I won’t be a second,” she said, and ran out of the room. He sat there, his backsides liking the old chair, and thought excitedly. You’re the first. Miss Fisher—she’s the second. He wondered how that would sound if he ever told it at the hospital. He put the speculation aside to think about later.
    After a moment she came out of the bedroom carrying the black metal box. “I’m not a stupid woman, Lulu,” she said. “Really I’m not. I read and I think and I can keep my end up when I talk with well-educated people. But sometimes the brightest of us can be more stupid than the slowest witted. Well, anyway, I’ll admit it. I finally had to talk it out with someone. I did, Lulu—and I got the answer.” She inserted the key in the box, turned it, raised the black metal lid. “He’s a dear man, a brilliant man. He’s a psychiatrist. I told him everything, but you mustn’t worry about that, Lulu. They’re like
priests
. Anyway, I didn’t even tell him your name.”
    She rummaged in the box and found a paper and began to gesture with it while she talked.
    “There it was, right in front of my silly old eyes, and I never even saw it. He explained to me that it was
terribly
important to you to thank we were living together
without
being married. He said it made a man of you. He said you had been very strictly brought up and that you had—well, he called it a ‘black-and-white’ morality. He said you took it so seriously when you were a child that you had nothing at all on the black side—not so much as cheating on a school examination, or hitting a puppy in your whole life. That’s why, he said, when I finally told you that our living together was a ‘white’ thing, and had been from the beginning, it was a terrible blow to your self-confidence. You just couldn’t stand