He did not reply. They passed, still slowly, through a shopping center and a housing development. Presently they came into a suburban street lined with trees and with large, unfenced gardens. Clem drew the car in to the curb, and switched off the engine. Two boys were riding bicycles down the sidewalk, and a man washing his car turned to look at them in the fading light. Nettie stared into her lap.

Clem put his arm along the back of the seat without touching her. “Now what’s all this about?” he asked her.

She smiled faintly. “You sound like a policeman.”

“But, darling, whatever is it? I only said the weekend seemed no worse than usual, and you tell me you never want to see me again.”

What cowards men are, she thought. “It can’t be that incomprehensible,” she said.

His fingers touched the back of her neck. She inclined her head further, away from his hand. The tears returned to her eyes. An Irish terrier ran up to the car from a nearby garden and began to bark at them. The man washing his car called sharply: “Casey!”

“Don’t cry.” But this time it seemed that he said it for her sake and not his own.

“No,” she said, apologetically, the tears now falling for his sympathy. “I’m sorry, I suppose it’s the strain.”

“Well, of course,” he replied, quite gently. “Of course.”

“You don’t know how isolated one feels. You have so many—attachments.”

“You make me sound like a vacuum cleaner.” He smiled. With his other hand he lifted a strand of damp hair back from her cheek.

She went on. “Perhaps it is all ordinary—what one should expect. I have only this to go on, so I don’t know. It seems terrible. Because you are—have lived longer,” she emended gracefully, “you have a clearer idea of what will happen. I can’t see anything but a disaster … if this were carried to its logical conclusion.” Her voice trembled.

His hand moved patiently along the exposed slope of her neck. “Life,” he remarked, “is not strong on logical conclusions. Perhaps fortunately. But I do forget about your age. Because you are the youngest of us, you are the most important. And May would agree with that.” (Her position seems to have been completely reversed, Nettie noted.) “You have no experience to guide you. As you say, I know so much more.”

She smiled again. “‘I said an elder soldier, not a better.’”

He turned her toward him and drew her head against his shoulder. She did not resist or relax, and he sat with his arm around her. “Are you really going to leave me?”

She sighed. “Does it look like it?”

“On the contrary. I don’t know what’s going on in here.” He touched her head.

“Casey! Come here!” shouted the man with the hose.

“Shall we move on before this dog loses all its illusions?” he asked her.

“But we haven’t decided anything.”