y
emerged from past into present clearly into focus, technicolored focus.
"I've got a little surprise upstairs in my closet."

He found himself taking the stairs two at a time without effort. Shaw
had definitely been right, he decided when he discovered the exertion
had not winded him in the slightest. He went into the big room
overlooking the front lawn, now covered with much-trodden snow, that he
had fallen heir to after his father died.

Karen, the Swedish-born second maid, was opening the bed. He had
completely forgotten Karen, had to battle against staring at her. She
was a perfect incipient human brood-mare--lush not-yet-fat figure, broad
pelvis, meaningless pretty-enough face. Now what the devil had been his
relations with _her_?

Since he couldn't remember, he decided they must have been innocuous. He
said, "Hi, Karen, broken up any new homes lately?"

She said, "Oh--_you_, Mr. Coulter!" She giggled and fled, stumbling over
the threshold in her hurry.

Coulter looked after her, his eyebrows high. Well, he thought, here was
something he had evidently missed entirely. Karen's crush was painfully
apparent, viewed from a vantage of two decades of added experience. Or
perhaps he had been smarter than he remembered.

The gallon of home-made gin was stuck behind the textbook-filled carton
on the back floor of his closet, where somehow he had known it must be.
It was between a third and half full of colorless liquid. He uncorked
it, sniffed and shuddered. Prohibition was going to take a bit of
getting used to after two decades of Repeal.

Half an hour later he sipped his rather dire martini and listened to his
mother talk. Not to the words especially, for she was one of those
nearly-extinct well-bred women, brought up in the horsehair amenities of
the late Victorian era, who could talk charmingly and vivaciously and at
considerable length without saying anything. It was pleasant merely to
sit and sip and let the words flow over him.

She looked remarkably well, he thought, for a woman who was to die
within a year of galloping cancer. She seemed to have recovered entirely
from the emotional aftermath of his father's death. So much so that he
found himself wondering how deeply she had loved the man with whom she
had spent some thirty-eight years of her life.

She was slim and quick and sure in her movements and her figure, of
which she was inordinately proud, resembled that of a girl rather than
the body of a w