Every man has a retirement picture in which he does those things he never had time to do—makes the journeys, reads the neglected books he always pretended to have read. For many years the sheriff dreamed of spending the shining time hunting and fishing—wandering in the Santa Lucia range, camping by half-remembered streams. And now that it was almost time he knew he didn’t want to do it. Sleeping on the ground would make his leg ache. He remembered how heavy a deer is and how hard it is to carry the dangling limp body from the place of the kill. And, frankly, he didn’t care for venison anyway. Madame Reynaud could soak it in wine and lace it with spice but, hell, an old shoe would taste good with that treatment.

Lee had bought a percolator. Quinn could hear the water spluttering against the glass dome, and his long-trained mind made the suggestion that Lee hadn’t told the truth about having fresh-made coffee.

It was a good mind the old man had—sharpened in its work. He could bring up whole faces in his mind and inspect them, and also scenes and conversations. He could play them over like a record or a film. Thinking of venison, his mind had gone about cataloguing the sitting room and his mind nudged him, saying, “Hey, there’s something wrong here—something strange.”

The sheriff heeded the voice and looked at the room—flowered chintz, lace curtains, white drawn-work table cover, cushions on the couch covered with a bright and impudent print. It was a feminine room in a house where only men lived.

He thought of his own sitting room. Mrs. Quinn had chosen, bought, cleaned, every single thing in it except a pipestand. Come to think of it, she had bought the pipestand for him. There was a woman’s room too. But this was a fake. It was too feminine—a woman’s room designed by a man—and overdone, too feminine. That would be Lee. Adam wouldn’t even see it, let alone put it together—no—Lee trying to make a home, and Adam not even seeing it.

Horace Quinn remembered questioning Adam so very long ago, remembered him as a man in agony. He could still see Adam’s haunted and horrified eyes. He had thought then of Adam as a man of such honesty that he couldn’t conceive anything else. And in the years he had seen much of Adam. They both belonged to the Masonic Order. They went through the chairs together. Horace followed Adam as Master of the Lodge and both of them wore their Past Master’s pins. And Adam had been set apart—an invisible wall cut him off from the world. You couldn’t get into him—he couldn’t get out to you. But in that old agony there had been no wall.

In his wife Adam had touched the living world. Horace thought of her now, gray and washed, the needles in her throat and the rubber formalin tubes hanging down from the ceiling.

Adam could do no dishonesty. He didn’t want anything. You had to crave something to be dishonest. The sheriff wondered what went on behind the wall, what pressures, what pleasures and achings.