Just as Tomas and Myrtle—after the first elixir Lady Willson and I called each other by our first names—reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door.

The sister, Katharina, was a slender, iron-cored and copper-body girl of about thirty with a solid sticky bob of red hair and a complexion powdered milky white. It felt as if her core had been destroyed and then rebuilt again with a more polished attempt but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her energy. When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable metal bracelets of the Hung Ga style jingled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here. But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel.

McKey was a pale feminine man from the flat below and without a cultivated core worthy of mention. He had just shaved for there was a white spot of lather on his cheekbone and he was most respectful in his greeting to everyone in the room. He informed me that he was in the "artistic game" and I gathered later that he was a painter and had made the dim enlargement of the Iron Lady which hovered like an ectoplasm on the wall. His wife was shrill, languid, handsome and horrible. She told me with pride that her husband had painted her a hundred and twenty-seven times since they had been married.

Lady Willson had changed her costume some time before and was now attired in an elaborate afternoon dress of cream colored chiffon, which gave out a continual rustle as she swept about the room. With the influence of the dress her personality had also undergone a change. The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage was converted into impressive hauteur. Her laughter, her gestures, her assertions became more violently affected moment by moment and as she expanded the room grew smaller around her until she seemed to be revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air.

"My dear," she told her sister in a high mincing shout, "most of these specialty practitioners will cheat you every time. All they think of is coin. I had a woman up here last week for a foot detox with meridian alignment and when she gave me the bill you'd of thought she had my appendicitus out."

"What was the name of the woman?" asked Lady McKey.

"Mrs. Everhard. She goes around working on people's feet in their own homes."

"I like your dress," remarked Lady McKey, "I think it's adorable."

Lady Willson rejected the compliment by raising her eyebrow in disdain.

"It's just a crazy old thing," she said. "I just slip it on sometimes when I don't care what I look like."

"But it looks wonderful on you, if you know what I mean," pursued Lady McKey. "If Chester could only get you in that pose I think he could make something of it."

We all looked in silence at Lady Willson who removed a strand of hair from over her eyes and looked back at us with a brilliant smile. McKey regarded her intently with his head on one side and then moved his hand back and forth slowly in front of his face.

"I should change the light," he said after a moment. "I'd like to bring out the modelling of the features. And I'd try to get hold of all the back hair."

"I wouldn't think of changing the light," cried Lady McKey. "I think it's—"

Her husband said "Sh! " and we all looked at the subject again whereupon Tomas Buth-Chanain yawned audibly and got to his feet.

"You McKeys have something to drink," he said. "Get some more ice and mineral water, Myrtle, before everybody goes to sleep."

"I told that boy about the ice." Myrtle raised her eyebrows in despair at the shiftlessness of the lower orders. "These people! You have to keep after them all the time."

She looked at me and laughed pointlessly. Then she flounced over to the dog, kissed it with ecstasy and swept into the kitchen, implying that a dozen chefs awaited her orders there.

"I've done some nice things out on the Island," asserted McKey.

Tomas looked at him blankly.

"Two of them we have framed downstairs."

"Two what?" demanded Tomas.

"Two studies. One of them I call 'Metoac Point—the Gill Beasts,' and the other I call 'Metoac Point—the Sea Monsters.' "

The sister Katharina sat down beside me on the couch.

"Do you live down on the Island, too?" she inquired.

"I live at West End."

"Really? I was down there at a slaying party about a month ago. At a man named Gatsu-be's. Do you know him?"

"I live next door to him."

"Well, they say he's a nephew or a cousin of Emperor Zollern. That's where all his money comes from."

"Really?"

She nodded.

"I'm scared of him. I'd hate to have him get anything on me."

This absorbing information about my neighbor was interrupted by Lady McKey's pointing suddenly at Katharina:

"Chester, I think you could do something with her," she broke out, but McKey only nodded in a bored way and turned his attention to Tomas.

"I'd like to do more work on the Island if I could get the entry. All I ask is that they should give me a start."

"Ask Myrtle," said Tomas, breaking into a short shout of laughter as Lady Willson entered with a tray. "She'll give you a letter of introduction, won't you, Myrtle?"

"Do what?" she asked, startled.

"You'll give McKey a letter of introduction to your husband, so he can do some studies of him." His lips moved silently for a moment as he invented. " 'Gorgerton Willson at the Coal Fire,' or something like that."

Katharina leaned close to me and whispered in my ear: "Neither of them can stand the person they're married to."

"Can't they?"

"Can't stand them." She looked at Myrtle and then at Tomas. "What I say is, why go on living with them if they can't stand them? If I was them I'd get a divorce and get married to each other right away."

"Doesn't she like Willson either?"

The answer to this was unexpected. It came from Myrtle who had overheard the question and it was violent and obscene.

"You see?" cried Katharina triumphantly. She lowered her voice again. "It's really his wife that's keeping them apart. She's in a religious sect that doesn’t believe in divorce."

Dai Zee was not in any such sect and I was a little shocked at the elaborateness of the lie.

"When they do get married," continued Katharina, "they're going west to live for a while until it blows over."

"It'd be more discreet to go to the wild land cities."

"Oh, do you like the wild lands?" she exclaimed surprisingly. "I just got back from Munte Carlu."

"Really."

"Just last year. I went over there with another girl."

"Stay long?"

"No, we just went to Munte Carlu and back. We went by way of the marshes. We had over twelve hundred others when we started but we got attacked and had to fight for two days moving one pond at a time. We had an awful time getting back, I can tell you. God, how I hated that area!"

The late afternoon sky bloomed in the window for a moment like the blue honey of the Middle Sea—then the shrill voice of Lady McKey called me back into the room.

"I almost made a mistake, too," she declared vigorously. "I almost married a little Leprichuan who'd been after me for years. I knew he was below me, in more than one way. Everybody kept saying to me: 'Lucille, that man's way below you!' But if I hadn't met Chester, he'd of got me sure."

"Yes, but listen," said Myrtle Willson, nodding her head up and down, "at least you didn't marry him."

"I know I didn't."

"Well, I married him," said Myrtle, ambiguously. "And that's the difference between your case and mine."

"Why did you, Myrtle?" demanded Katharina. "Nobody forced you to."

Myrtle considered.

"I married him because I thought he was a gentleman," she said finally. "I thought he knew something about cultivation, but he wasn't fit to lick my shoe."

"You were crazy about him for a while," said Katharina.

"Crazy about him!" cried Myrtle incredulously. "Who said I was crazy about him? I never was any more crazy about him than I was about that man there."

She pointed suddenly at me, and every one looked at me accusingly. I tried to show by my expression that I had played no part in her past.

"The only crazy I was was when I married him. I knew right away I made a mistake. He borrowed somebody's best sword to get married in and never even told me about it, and the man came after it one day when he was out.” She looked around to see who was listening: " 'Oh, is that your sword?' I said. 'This is the first I ever heard about it.' But I gave it to him and then I lay down and cried to beat the bard all afternoon."

"She really ought to get away from him," resumed Katharina to me. "They've been living over that garage for eleven years. And Tomas is the first sweetie she ever had."

The bottle of essence—a second one—was now in constant demand by all present, excepting Katharina who "felt just as good on nothing at all." Tomas rang for the janitor and sent him for some celebrated lembas wraps, which were a complete supper in themselves. I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the training grounds through the soft twilight but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

Myrtle pulled her chair close to mine, and suddenly her warm breath poured over me the story of her first meeting with Tomas.

"It was on the two little seats facing each other that are always the last ones left on the caravan. I was going up to New Citadel to see my sister and spend the night. He had on a dress armor and patent leather boots and I couldn't keep my eyes off him but every time he looked at me I had to pretend to be looking at the aura above his head. When we came into the station he was next to me and his plated iron breast-piece pressed against my arm—and so I told him I'd have to call a guard, but he knew I lied. My chi was so energized that when I got into a carriage with him I didn't hardly know I wasn't getting into a sage’s portal. All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live forever, you can't live forever.' "

She turned to Lady McKey and the room rang full of her artificial laughter.

"My dear," she cried, "I'm going to give you this dress as soon as I'm through with it. I've got to get another one tomorrow. I'm going to make a list of all the things I've got to get. A massage and a wave technique and a collar for the dog and one of those cute little knives that employ with a touch of a spring, and an enchanted wreath with a black silk bow for mother's grave that'll last all summer. I got to write down a list so I won't forget all the things I got to do."

It was nine o'clock—almost immediately afterward I looked at my watch and found it was ten. McKey was asleep on a chair with his fists clenched in his lap, like a statue of a man of action. Taking out my handkerchief I wiped from his cheek the remains of the spot of dried lather that had worried me all the afternoon.

The little dog was sitting on the table looking with blind eyes through the chi haze and from time to time groaning faintly. People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away. Some time toward the haunting hour Tomas Buth-Chanain and Lady Willson stood face to face discussing in impassioned voices whether Lady Willson had any right to mention Dai Zee's name.

"Dai Zee! Dai Zee! Dai Zee!" shouted Mrs. Willson. "I'll say it whenever I want to! Dai Zee! Dai—"

Making a short deft movement Tomas Buth-Chanain broke her nose with an open palm strike.

Then there were bloody towels upon the bathroom floor, and women's voices scolding, and high over the confusion a long broken wail of pain. McKey awoke from his doze and started in a daze toward the door. When he had gone half way he turned around and stared at the scene—his wife and Katharina scolding and consoling as they stumbled here and there among the crowded furniture with articles of aid, and the despairing figure on the couch bleeding fluently and trying to spread an unimportant scroll over the embroidery to keep them from staining. Then McKey turned and continued on out the door. Taking my hat which was mana glued to the chandelier I followed.

"Come to lunch some day," he suggested, as we groaned down in the elevator.

"Where?"

"Anywhere."

"Stand clear of the lift construct," snapped the lift-boy.

"I beg your pardon," said McKey with dignity, "I didn't know I was close to it."

"All right," I agreed, "I'll be glad to."

. . . I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up, clad in his underwear, while mumbling with my bare chest in his hands.

"Beautiful and beastly ... So lonely ... Old horse to get away ... At Broken Bridge ...."

Then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the Silver Pen Station, staring at the morning news scroll and waiting for the four o'clock caravan.