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it.”
    “Now I’m going to tell you something I never thought I’d ever tell to a living soul. I was on my own when I was fourteen, and I always had to think things out for myself. Sometimes I did well at that, and sometimes I failed. But I always thought things out for myself first—not for laws or anyone else or customs or anythinglike that, but just for myself alone. Well, never mind all that now. One of the main things was—I thought I had to have freedom. I made up my mind I’d do what I wanted with whom I wanted, just as long as I was discreet. As long as I put a partition that was like a high wall between the one thing and the other. You don’t understand this, do you? Well, that’s all right, You’ll understand all you need to in just one more minute.”
    “Didn’t you ever wonder what I did with my weekends for nineteen years, Lulu? Didn’t you
care?
”
    He started to answer, but she gave him no chance. “No; I don’t suppose it ever occurred to you to wonder. It was just the way things were—like water running downhill and the sun coming up. You knew I was going to be away Saturday and Sunday, and you just accepted it. Poor Lulu! Well. I see I’ve get to tell you then. I was taking a course in economics for a while. Let me see that would be about six years ago. Oh, I’ve done all sorts of things on weekends—and anyway, there was this man. You see, and I don’t know what happened to me at all, but I’d never felt like that in my life before. And I guess I never will again,” she added in a whisper, tragically.
    Then she blew her nose. “I have the most awful cold, Lulu. I think I’m a bit feverish. So there I was, feeling like that about this man, you see, and for a while I thought he might feel the same way about me. So I saw a lawyer and showed him my papers, and I got this. Here, Lulu, this is yours. This is for you.” She handed him the paper.
    The whole episode was so reminiscent of the one which had blasted his quiet life once before that he took the paper without even glancing at it. He simply closed his eyes, and got up and stood trembling, waiting for he knew not what.
    She understood and laughed happily. Then she coughed, and laughed again and took the paper away from him. “You’re afraid of it, and I don’t blame you. Here, I’ll read it to you.” Her hand touched his, and he felt the paper slip out of his fingers.
    “ ‘There came before me in the County Court in the township of …’ Oh, let’s skip all that lawyers’ talk. Here it is. ‘Therefore by weight of evidence in camera’—that means secret and confidential—‘the marriage of said L. Llewellyn and said Ivy Shoots is herebyannulled and held to be void and without existence.’ ”
    She pushed the paper triumphantly back into his lap. “You understand that, Lulu? It isn’t a divorce. A divorce says a marriage was and is no more. This says that in the eyes of the law and in my eyes, Lulu, and in your eyes, Lulu, the wedding never took place. You see? You see? So if that was what was bothering you, it needn’t any longer. It’s gone. We’re without benefit of clergy if that’s how you’d like it to be. We can call it common-law if you want that instead. Lulu I just don’t know—?”
    He lay in a pressing welter of thoughts and scraps of thoughts. The one which came swirling to the top first had to do with the nature of the certificate in a modern culture. The thought wasn’t quite that lucid in him, of course. He saw the blasting of his painless existence by a piece of paper. He saw people breaking the law and being broken by it—a piece of paper for each. A piece of paper for everything you did or didn’t do, even the things which were truly and really done, just by changing the paper.
    “Lulu,” she whispered, “If you should want to—you can even m-marry someone else. You’re free to do that, to hurt me that much if …” And then she began to cough. The wracking, all-too-familiar