keleton of its summer coat of ivy looking bare
and chilly against the sunset breeze. The bit of sky he could see
through the houses and leafless trees was grey and yellow and cold.

The house was there, just as he had left it. It was still a good-sized
mansion in comfortable ugly space-wasting Reign-of-Terror Tuscan,
standing ornate and towered and turreted behind a fence of granite posts
connected by long iron pipes that sagged in the middle as the result of
children walking them on their way to and from the public schools around
the corner on Sheldon Street.

Coulter turned left and felt the crunch of ashes under his tires as he
drove across the sidewalk, through the fence opening, into the driveway
to the open-doored garage awaiting him. He reminded himself to be
careful of the jutting nail that had torn his glove.

The concrete floor of the garage felt cold against the soles of his
shoes. Coulter stamped his feet as he turned on the heater and moved
toward the door. It stuck--he had forgotten about that--and he swore
lustily as he exerted strength he had forgotten ever possessing to yank
it clear of the snag and across the front of the building.

He didn't want the Pontiac to freeze. Not when he had a date with Eve
Lawton.... A date with Eve Lawton.... He hadn't thought of Eve in years,
except on those occasional sleepless nights when he amused himself with
seeking to visualize the women he had known in a Biblical sense of the
word.

Most of them were faceless units in a faceless and somewhat undignified
parade. But not Eve. She wasn't pretty--not in the sense of the
doll-faced creatures that adorned the movie magazines or even the
healthy maidens with whom he occasionally rollicked since coming home
from college.

Eve had a sensitivity of feature that was a sounding board for her
emotions. Coulter paused against the garage door and thought about her.
With the knowledge of twenty years he knew now that what Eve had, or had
had twenty years ago, was the basis of beauty, the inner intangible
which stamps a woman a woman above other women....

_What in hell has happened to me, is happening to me?_ Coulter felt the
chill of the evening wind stab deep into his bones. Then he looked down
at his vanished embonpoint and patted with his gloves the flat hardness
that had replaced it. It was all right with him as long as he didn't
wake up too soon--before his date with Eve anyway.

Coulter walked around the house and