The thoughts were very hard for him to face now and he wanted to stop thinking about the rabbits and birds he might crush and never see for the speed of his car. He wondered if birds had an awful lot of blood in them. He wondered if birds bled after they had been crushed and were dead. He wondered if Karen cared or whether she would stop her car if she should ever crush something. And he wondered if, after being with her, he would care. But he was tired of thinking.

“We’ll talk some more about it later,” he told her.

Karen smiled at him and then moved very close to Charles on the sofa.

MARGOT PAYNE DID NOT SLEEP well at night. She did not want to lie on her back because then she would have to look up at the ceiling. And if she lay on her belly her face would be pressed down into the pillow, and before she knew it there would be a wet spot on the pillow. She was losing control over her crying and now seemed to do it whenever she was in bed alone, or whenever something not human pressed close against her breast and body. Now she found that the bed was responsible for the tears and there was no way open in her mind to rationalize their coming when they did. Earlier, before Charles had undergone his metamorphosis, she had been quick to assign the cause of them to Eric. But now, with this thing happening to Charles and with the growth of her dependency on him, she was able to make other assignments for the crying. It was Charles’s fault, and it was the fault of many of her friends, girls who, unsuspecting of the consequences to her, took him to their breasts for a while because he seemed to them, for the moment, an exciting thing to have, and taking him for the moment seemed like an exciting thing to do. And while she understood this and the way they were, it gave her small comfort knowing the causes, and it did not help sleep come any easier. She found it very difficult to approach sleep.