I think you're being deliberately difficult. Do you
know one of the reasons why I took such pains to teach Magnolia English?
It was that I hoped she would be a companion for you, that you could
talk to each other when I had to be away from home."

"Why do you call her Magnolia? She isn't a lot like one."

"Isn't she? I thought she was. You see, I don't know so much botany,
after all." Actually, he had picked that name for the tree because it
expressed both the arboreal and the feminine at the same time--and also
because it was one of the loveliest names he knew. But he couldn't tell
Phyllis that; there would be further misunderstanding. "Of course she
has a name in her own language, but I can't pronounce it."

"They _do_ have a language of their own then?"

"Naturally, though they don't get much chance to speak it, since they've
grown so few and far apart that verbal communication has become
difficult. They communicate by a network of roots that they've
developed."

"I don't think that's so clever."

"I merely said ... oh, what's the use of trying to explain everything to
you? You just don't want to understand."

* * * * *

Phyllis put down her needlework and closed her eyes. "James," she said,
opening them again, "it's no use pretending. I've been trying to be
sympathetic and understanding, but I can't do it. That tree--I've forced
myself to be nice to her, but the more I see of her, the more convinced
I am that she's trying to steal you from me."

Phyllis was beginning to poison his mind, he thought, because it had
seemed to him also, in his last conversation with Magnolia, that he had
discerned more than ordinary warmth in her attitude toward him ... and
perhaps a trace of spite toward his wife?

Preposterous! The tree had only been trying to cheer him up as any
friend might reasonably do. After all, a tree and a man.... Nonsense!
One had an anabolic metabolism, one a catabolic.

But this was a different kind of tree. She spoke, she read, she was
capable of conscious turgor movements. And he, he had often thought
secretly, was a different kind of man. Whereas Phyllis....

But that was disloyalty--to the type as well as the individual. The tree
could be a companion to him, but she could not give him sons to work his
land; she could not give him daughters to populate his planet; moreover,
she did not, could not possibly know what human love meant, while
Phyllis could at lea