east an hour
before they started their routine about the going-home process. With
minor variations in the dialog, and with longer and more frequent
silences, it almost followed the Wednesday night script. The variation
puzzled James even more. This session went according to program for a
while until Tim Fisher admitted with regret that it was, indeed, time for
him to depart. At which juncture Mrs. Bagley did not leap to her feet to
accept his offer to do that which she had been asking him to do for a
half hour. Mrs. Bagley compounded the affair by sighing deeply and
agreeing with him that it was a shame that it was so late and that she,
too, wished that he could stay a little longer. This, of course, put them
precisely where they were a half hour earlier and they had to start the
silly business all over again.

They parted after a final fifteen-minute discussion at the front door.
This discussion covered Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and finally came to
agreement on Wednesday.

And so James Holden went to bed that night fully convinced that in a town
of approximately two thousand people--he did not count the two or three
hundred A.E.C.-College group as part of the problem--there were entirely
too few attractive leftovers from which Mrs. Bagley could choose.

But as this association grew, it puzzled him even more. For in his
understanding, any person forced to accept a second-rate choice does so
with an air of resignation, but not with a cheerful smile, a sparkle in
the eyes, and two hours of primping.

James sought the answer in his books but they were the wrong volumes for
reference of this subject. He considered the local Public Library only
long enough to remember that it carried a few hundred books suitable for
the A.E.C.-College crew and a thousand or so of second-hand culls donated
by local citizens during cleanup campaigns. He resorted to buying books
by mail through advertisements in newspapers and magazines and received a
number of volumes of medical treatises, psychological texts, and a book
on obstetrics that convinced him that baby-having was both rare and
hazardous. He read _By Love Possessed_ but he did not recognize the many
forms of love portrayed by the author because the volume was not
annotated with signs or provided with a road map, and he did not know
it when he read about it.

He went through the Kinsey books and absorbed a lot of data and graphs
and figures on human behavior that meant nothing to