ration of some
kind--but that's all."

* * * * *

Meantime circumstances were not going well with us; the financial
burden of Tristan's support, added to the strain of the situation, was
becoming overwhelming. Tristan knew this and felt it keenly; this
brought him to a momentous decision. He looked down at us from the
ceiling one day with an expression of unusual tenseness, and
announced that he was going out permanently, and to take part in the
world again.

"I've gotten now so that I can bear to look out of the windows quite
well. It's only a matter of time and practise until I can stand the
open. After all, it isn't any worse than being a steel worker or
steeplejack. Even if the worst came to the worst, I'd rather be burst
open by the frozen vacuum of interstellar space than to splash upon a
sidewalk before an admiring populace--and people do _that_ every day!"

Dr. Grosnoff, who was present, expressed great delight. His patient
was coming along well mentally, at least. Alice sat down, trembling.

"But, good Lord, Tristan," I said, "what possible occupation could you
follow?"

"Oh, I've brooded over that for weeks, and I've crossed the Rubicon. I
think we're a long way past such petty things as personal pride. Did
it ever occur to you that what from one point of view is a monstrous
catastrophe, from another is an asset?"

"What in the dickens are you talking about?" I asked.

"I'm talking about the--the--" he gulped painfully--"the stage."

Alice wrung her hands, crying bitterly:

"Wonderful! Splendid! Tristan LeHuber, The World's Unparalleled
Upside-Down Man! He Doesn't Know Whether He's On His Head Or His
Heels. He's Always Up In The Air About Something, But You Can't Upset
Him! Vaudeville To-night--The Bodongo Brothers, Brilliant Burmese
Balancers--Arctic Annie, the Prima Donna of Sealdom, and Tristan
LeHuber, The Balloon Man--He Uses An Anchor For A Parachute!" At last
indeed the LeHuber family will have arrived sensationally in the
public eye!

"There are," Alice raved, "two billion people on the earth to-day.
Counting three generations per century, there have been about twelve
billion of us in the last two hundred years. And out of all those, and
all the millions and billions before that, we had to be picked for
this loathsome cosmic joke--just little us for all that distinction!
Why, oh, why? If our romance _had_ to be spoiled by a tragedy smeared
across the billbo