“Excellent idea, Perdoo, excellent.”

“Uh… Oh, well you pick out the one you want, okay?”

“The one?”

“Yeah. This is the one,” turning it to show him as the faces of threatened girls are roughly turned by villains, “that I picked out, see?”

“But but I thought we were both going to—” gesturing feebly toward what he still cannot quite accept as Perdoo’s melon, in whose intaglio net now, as among craters of the pale moon, a face is indeed emerging, the face of a captive woman with eyes cast downward, lids above as smooth as Persian ceilings… .

“Well, no, I usually, uh—” this is embarrassing for Perdoo, it’s like being called on to, to justify eating an apple, or even popping a grape into your mouth—“just, well, sort of, eat them… whole, you know,” chuckling in what he hopes is a friendly way, to indicate politely the social oddness of this discussion—

—but the chuckle is taken the wrong way by Speed: taken as evidence of mental instability in this slightly bucktoothed and angular American, who is dancing now from stoop to English stoop, lank as a street-puppet in the wind. Shaking his head, he nevertheless selects his own whole canteloupe, realizes he’s been left to pay the bill, which is exorbitant, and goes skipping off after Perdoo, hippety hop both of them, tra-la-la-la slam right into another dead end:

“Jenny? No—no Jenny here… .”

“A Jennifer, perhaps? Genevieve?”

“Ginny” (it could’ve been misspelled), “Virginia?”

“If you gentlemen are looking for a good time—” Her grin, her red, maniacally good-morning-and-I-mean-good! grin, is wide enough to hold them both right, shivering, smiling, here, and she’s old enough to be their Mother—their joint Mother, combining the worst traits of Mrs. Perdoo and Mrs. Speed—in fact she is turning now into just that, even as they watch. These wrecked seas are full of temptresses—it’s watery and wanton out here all right. As the two gawking soft-boiled shamuses are drawn along into her aura, winking right here in the street, brassy with henna-glare, with passion-flowers on rayon—just before the last stumbling surrender into the lunacy of her purple eyes, they allow themselves, for the sinful tickle of it, a last thought of the project they’re supposed to be here on—Slothropian Episodic Zone, Weekly Historical Observations (SEZ WHO)—a thought that comes running out in the guise of a clown, a vulgar, loose-ends clown bespangled with wordless jokes about body juices, bald-headed, an amazing fall of nose-hair out both nostrils which he has put into braids and tied with acid-green bows—a scrabbling dash now out past sandbags and falling curtain, trying to get back his breath, to garble to them in a high unpleasant screech: “No Jenny. No Sally W. No Cybele. No Angela. No Catherine. No Lucy. No Gretchen. When are you going to see it? When are you going to see it?”

No “Darlene” either. That came in yesterday. They traced the name as far as the residence of a Mrs. Quoad. But the flashy young divorcée never, she declared, even knew that English children were named “Darlene.” She was dreadfully sorry. Mrs. Quoad spent her days lounging about a rather pedicured Mayfair address, and both investigators felt relieved to be out of the neighborhood… .