nyway. And how do you think
_I_ felt when a _tree_ answered me back? You don't care that I fainted
dead away, and I've never fainted before in my life. All you care about
is that old vegetable's feelings! It was bad enough, feeling for five
months that someone had come between us, but to find out it wasn't
some_one_ but some_thing_--!"

"Phyllis," he said coldly, "I'll thank you to keep a civil tongue in
your head."

Dropping into the overstuffed chair, his wife dabbed at her eyes with a
handkerchief. "She wasn't so very polite to me!"

"Look, Phyllis--" he strove to make his voice calm, adult,
reasonable--"you happened to have hit on rather a touchy point with her.
Those trees are dioecious, you know, like us, and she isn't mated. And,
well, she has rather a lot of xylem zones--rings, you know."

"Are you trying to tell me she's old?"

"Well, she's no sapling any more. And, consideration aside, you know
it's government's policy for us to establish good relations with any
intelligent life-form we have to share a planet with. You weren't in
there trying."

Phyllis put away her handkerchief with what he hoped would be a final
sniff. "I suppose I shouldn't have acted that way," she conceded.

"Now you're talking like my own dear Phyllis," James said tenderly,
though, as a matter of fact, he had a very remote idea of what his own
dear Phyllis was like. He had met her only a couple of months before the
scout mission was scheduled, and so their courtship had been brief, and
the actual weeks of marriage even briefer. He had remembered Phyllis as
beautiful--and she was beautiful. He had not, however, remembered her as
pig-headed--and pig-headed she was, too.

"How come she hasn't a mate? I didn't think trees were choosy."

* * * * *

He wouldn't take exception to that statement, uncharitable though it
was; after all, someone whose only acquaintance with trees had been with
the Terrestrial variety would naturally be incapable of appreciating the
total tree at its highest development.

"It's a great tragedy," he told her in a hushed tone. "There was a
blight some years back and most of the male trees died off, except for a
few on the other side of the planet--well out of bee-shot, even if the
females there would let the females here have any pollen, which they
absolutely won't."

"I don't blame them," Phyllis said coldly. Of course she would identify
at once with the trees whose domes