remember. Here, you cut the limes while I
look for the squeezer."

* * * * *

While Dr. Quink was cutting the limes he didn't exactly talk to himself,
but thoughts did present themselves to his mind with very nearly verbal
exactitude. The immediate progression towards a solution of this case
did not seem to be so clearly cut out as he had assumed it would be.
There were, it now became more and more obvious, complications he had
not foreseen. Mrs. Fairfield was not exactly acting toward him as a
psychiatrist normally expects the wife of a patient to, so that,
although he found her pleasant and indeed invigorating, if that is the
word and he was not sure that it was but the only alternative that came
to his mind, stimulating, had connotations that he was not yet ready to
accept, although he did find her pleasant and et cetera yet he found her
behavior also disturbing, in the clinical sense this time, and the
revelation as to her distinctly limited memory should be described not
as a disturbance but as a downright earthquake, to ring in a
seismological metaphor that occurred to him as he nicked his finger
during the slicing of the fourth lime.

"Oh, did you cut yourself?" she said, straightening up from the lower
shelves of a pine cupboard. "I'm so sorry, but never mind. Here's the
squeezer."

The apparent non sequitur, coming in the midst of his thoughts that were
already confused, bewildered him for the moment, but he felt it would be
more fruitful to get back to the problem at hand and, blotting his
seeping blood with a handkerchief, he inquired after her reticent
memory.

"Oh, let's mix in the lime juice first. Aren't you at all anxious to see
how it will taste? Honestly, men have no curiosity."

Well, as it turned out, it tasted pretty good. At any rate, that was the
consensus of opinion, alcoholic as it might have been, as they returned
with the pitcher of green martinis to the living room. "The furthest
back that I can remember," Mimi said after they had settled themselves
on the divan, "the absolutely first thing I can remember is relieving my
bladder, if that makes any sense to you."

"As a matter of fact," Victor said, "it makes extremely good sense
indeed. If you will pardon me and kindly direct me towards the wash
room?"

* * * * *

When he returned after an absence of a few minutes, during which time
the muted sound of snoring emanated f