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tempt me. You entice me. You think I desire you, you’ll control me—I’ll do anything you say.”
    “And if I have to do that to put some steel into your backbone,” she replied, “why shouldn’t I?”
    Carr thought that Marcia had never looked so queenly or desirable. At the same time, he saw in a flash how the whole evening would go from here on. First he would beg her pardon. Then, to please her, he would pretend to become very interested in Keaton Fisher’s editorial counseling service. As the evening wore along, what with drinks and the hypnotic glitter of restaurant and nightclub, he actually would begin to get interested. And she would become coolly amorous when he took her home, and let him in, and give him his little reward for dancing to her tune.
    Like some puppet. Like some damned puppet dangling on her strings.
    Well, for once he wouldn’t. For once he’d break the pattern, no matter what it cost him. There were other places he could go tonight. She wasn’t his whole life, not quite.
    He had backed a couple steps away from her.
    She finished her drink. “I’m ready now,” she said smiling. “I’ll get my bag.”
    As she moved toward the bedroom, he watched her. He swallowed hard. Yes, there were other places. He had to prove that.
    When she was out of sight, he turned quickly and—the door was still ajar—walked rapidly and silently out of the room and down the hall.
    Yes, he kept telling himself, other places.
    Short of the elevator, he opened the door to the stairs. He hurried down the gray, squared spiral. Faster. Faster.
    Atop his mood of painful desperation, he was aware of a sudden sense of freedom, even excitement. For it had just occurred to him what the other place was. He had just realized the meaning of a phrase he had read uncomprehendingly an hour before: “…the lion’s tail near the five sisters…”

    Few people walk on the east side of Michigan Boulevard after dark. At such times the Art Institute looks very dead, with the automobile headlights and the colored glows from the busy side of the boulevard playing on its dark stone like archeologists’ flashlights. The two majestic bronze lions might well be guarding the portals of some monument of Roman antiquity. One wonders, though, whether the sculptor Keneys foresaw that the tail of the southernmost lion, conveniently horizontal, would always be kept polished bright by the casual elbows of art students and idlers, and now, the frightened girl.
    She watched Carr mount the steps, without any active sign of recognition. He might be part of some dream she was having. A forbidding cold wind was whipping in from the lake and she had buttoned up her cardigan. She didn’t seem so frightened now, but very alone, as if she had nowhere in the world to go and was waiting for someone who would never come. Carr stopped a half dozen paces away.
    She smiled and said, “Hello.”
    Carr walked over to her. His first words surprised him. “I met your small dark man with glasses. He ran away.”
    “Oh?” she remarked. “I’m sorry. He really is your friend—potentially. But he’s rather high strung. Indefinite. He was supposed to meet me here…” She glanced toward some distant electric numerals which told the time in order to attract attention to a gigantic bottle of beer.
    “Is he afraid of me?” Carr asked.
    She shrugged her shoulders. Headlights swept across her gray eyes. At the moment they seemed as enigmatic as those of a sphinx. “I had some vague idea of introducing the two of you,” she said. “But now I’m not so sure. About any of us.” Her voice dropped. The wind blew some strands of her shoulder-length brown hair against her cheek. “I never really thought you’d come, you know. Leaving notes like that is just a stupid way I have of tempting fate. You weren’t supposed to guess. How did you know it was the south lion? I don’t think you even looked at the north one.”
    Carr laughed. “Taft’s Great Lakes