uninhibited now."

There was one cry of horror from Cousin Aurelia and then silence.

Betty turned to the captain. He looked downcast, and Herman did, too.

"We'll just have to try something else, something clever," she told the
captain. "Cousin Aurelia seems dead set against you. It's because of
your being a pirate, I guess."

* * * * *

Charles and Betty spent the next couple of days avoiding any mention of
the captain's former profession and helping him think up new ways to
uninhibit Cousin Aurelia. He tried singing again, this time with an
augmented chorus of Herman's relations. When that also failed, he cooked
her a fine mushroom omelette. Then he caught her a young animal with
lavender ears to keep as a pet and he spent a whole evening reading
_Sonnets from the Portuguese_ aloud at her window.

She responded with sniffs and with occasional scraping noises of
furniture being moved to reinforce her defenses. Finally, to Betty's
distress, she pushed out a note announcing that henceforth she would
have nothing to do with the Buttons--and that no one could tell her that
poems like those were _Victorian_.

Before the third day was half over, the Captain was moping around,
Charles was peevish, and Betty had started to worry and fret.

So, in the late afternoon, they went on a picnic. Followed by Herman,
and by the four-armed dining room robot carrying two wicker hampers,
they walked around the lake to a broad grassy knoll where the strange
square trees grew in a circle, and prisms of quartz leaned from the
ground like Druids turned into stone. While they ate, the night advanced
softly, its moons weaving crystalline shadows of celadon, rose, and old
ivory.

[Illustration]

Betty waited until the last hint of daylight had vanished. Then, "It's
lovely," she whispered. "Poor Cousin Aurelia, it'd all be so simple if
she'd only come out, but--oh, I'm afraid that it's hopeless!"

"Hopeless?" Charles snorted. "It's easy. We'll break into her room, me
and Burgee, and hold her while you pour some of Sugar Plum's water down
her gullet. She'll be fixed up before she finds out what hit her."

"We mustn't do that," the captain said stiffly. "We can't employ
violence."

"Look who's talking!" Charles was amused. "An old pirate like you.
Robbing ships, making passengers walk the plank into space, shooting
people with ray guns, and--"

"Shh!" Betty warned. "Charles, that isn't polite. You k