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and all the rest. I powder myself with talc to look like alabaster."

    "What's alabaster?" asked Jane.
    "White," Tim told her. "Like marble."
    "When I'm posing," Nanny went on, "I believe I look very much like Aphrodite."
    "Who's Aphrodite?" asked Jane.
    "Daughter of Zeus. Also known as Venus. But the most famous statue of Venus has no arms. I have arms." She held them up. "So I think of myself as Aphrodite when I am posing as a statue."
    "You mean you're naked, Nanny?" Barnaby A asked in amazement.
    "Statues are never naked," Nanny said in a somewhat shocked voice. "They are nude. Anyway, I drape myself. I use a sheet."
    "So," Barnaby B said, poking his fork into a piece of raspberry pie, "you stand there nude, except for the sheet, and all powdered, and in a pose, and perfectly still?"
    "Well," Nanny admitted, "sometimes I wink."
    "The other day, that prospective buyer who ran downstairs screaming?" Tim asked. "Was that because you winked?"
    "Possibly," Nanny replied very primly.
    They were all silent for a moment, picturing the scene. The prospective buyer had looked truly horrified and had run shrieking through the front door and not been seen since.

    "What's that noise?" Barnaby B said suddenly. "I hear something banging!"
    "It's at the front of the house," Jane said, listening. "Someone is hammering."
    After a moment the noise ceased. They all went to look. More words had been added to the sign that was tacked to the window box.
    " Reduced? Cheaper? This house is never going to be sold," Tim murmured.
    "I can't imagine why not," said Nanny, smiling in an Aphrodite-like way.

11. An Astonishing acquisition

    Commander Melanoff opened the door and peered into the basket in astonishment. He looked up and down the street to see if a delivery man had left this ... this ... this thing on his doorstep by mistake.
    But no. The street was quite empty. Finally, in confusion because it kept smiling at him and no one had smiled at him in a very long time, he leaned down and lifted it out of its basket. Holding it at arm's length because its lower half was damp, Commander Melanoff carried the stubbly-haired baby into his mansion.
    He looked around for a suitable place to set it down. The velvet couch in the drawing room had holes in it that mice had made, and gray wads of stuffing were protruding from the holes. There was a table nearby, but an old, opened pizza box with some greenish pizza crusts inside had been on the table for weeks. Ants were crawling on it.

    Finally he carried the creature into the kitchen and laid it carefully on the drain board beside the sink. From his half-forgotten past, thinking back sadly to his own lost child, he vaguely remembered the procedure about diapers. In a nearby drawer, reaching with one arm while he kept the other firmly upon the wriggling infant, he located a folded dishtowel. He had not washed dishes in several years. He had thrown some away after they had been used, and others he had reused, simply heaping his takeout Chinese food or pizza slices onto the remains of the last meal. So there was still a drawer filled with laundered dishtowels, left over from the days when there had been cooks and servants in the large kitchen, the days when his wife had organized things like dish-towels by color and size and date of purchase. He fashioned one into a sort of diaper and tied it awkwardly around the bottom half of the baby. Then, holding the baby in one arm, he opened the large refrigerator and peered inside.

    Once, long ago, this refrigerator had been filled with juices and jams, casseroles and chickens, cheeses and pastries, salad greens and truffles and endives and olives. It had always been a little distressing to him that his meticulous wife had insisted on alphabetical arrangements. It meant that ascots were next to argyle socks in his dresser, and his underwear was tucked away with the umbrellas. Even here, in the kitchen, one had had to locate the anchovies in order to find the