eer and a family all rolled in together." She still
watched her writhing hands, not raising her eyes to Mike's.

"And--and, I suppose, a husband, too," she continued. "That is, he's
sort of the stand-in for a--well, a somebody to teach--to correct--to
reform. I guess every woman wants to--to _remake_ the man she meets--the
man she wants."

And then her eyes were suddenly on his. "But I don't. Not any more. I've
had enough of it." Then she looked back down at her hands.

Mike the Angel neither accepted nor rejected the statement. He merely
waited.

"He was mine," she said after a little while. "He was mine to mold, to
teach, to form. The others--the roboticists, the neucleonicists, the
sub-electronicists, all of them--were his instructors. All they did was
give him facts. It was I who gave him a personality.

"I made him. Not his body, not his brain, but his mind.

"I made him.

"I knew him.

"And I--I--"

Still staring at her hands, she clasped them together suddenly and
squeezed.

"And I loved him," she finished.

She looked up at Mike then. "Can you see that?" she asked tensely. "Can
you understand?"

"Yes," said Mike the Angel quietly. "Yes, I can understand that. Under
the same circumstances, I might have done the same thing." He paused.
"And now?"

She lowered her head again and began massaging her forehead with the
finger tips of both hands, concealing her face with her palms.

"And now," she said dully, "I know he's a machine. Snookums isn't a _he_
any more--he's an _it_. He has no personality of his own, he only has
what I fed into him. Even his voice is mine. He's not even a psychic
mirror, because he doesn't reflect _my_ personality, but a puppet
imitation of it, distorted and warped by the thousands upon thousands of
cold facts and mathematical relationships and logical postulates. And
none of these _added_ anything to him, as a personality. How could they?
He never had a _person_ality--only a set of behavior patterns that I
drilled into him over a period of eight years."

She dropped her hands into her lap and tilted her head back, looking at
the blank white shimmer of the glow plates.

"And now, suddenly, I see him for what he is--for what _it_ is. A
machine.

"It was never anything _but_ a machine. It is still a machine. It will
never be anything else.

"Personality is something that no machine can ever have. Idiosyncrasies,
yes. No two machines are identical. But any personality t