Cathy blushed and gave Joel a rather desperate glance. The talk of marriage, quite casual, had taken her by surprise. She was not prepared for everything to be taken so for granted.

“We’re not even married, Gramp.”

Cornelius chose to change the subject.

“Christina and I have experienced a winter of what you would call ‘being,’ I suppose, and I grant you that it has been very rich and wonderful.” He gazed down the table at his wife and smiled. “But I have a sort of feeling that we earned it, through a rather long life of hard work, bringing up children, keeping them afloat, and so forth.”

“But we don’t want to wait till we’re old, Sir.”

“Instant being is what you’re after!” Eben said.

“It’s not only that,” Cathy said. “We’re not afraid of being poor.”

“Of course. You’re the children of the affluent society,” Eben shot back, and Christina picked it up.

“Ellen is afraid. She has seen life cramped by poverty. She knows that it can be a blight.”

Joel had been thinking his own thoughts. “You know why my generation takes pot?” He looked around, waiting for the attention of the whole table. “It’s to take things easier, to relax and look at the beauty of the world, not worry about things that don’t matter. When I first came, I wanted a smoke terribly. I was haunted for a while by the idea that I must have one. I guess I was still in a state of shock over the car and everything—what my stepfather would say. Well, then I met Cathy and got to know Nick and Ellen Comstock and began to explore Willard, and after a while I forgot all about smoking pot. You asked me before dinner what it was that really happened to me here, Mr. Chapman, and I’ve been thinking that that is one thing. Just the tempo here, just the way people behave, made me loosen up and look around me, I guess.”

Eben shot an amused glance at Cornelius and then laughed aloud.

“Willard has been celebrated in a great many ways, but never, I think, as a substitute for marijuana!”

“No,” Joel said, for the first time just a little tense, “I don’t mean to say that. I mean that marijuana is a substitute for some kind of real living that goes on here. It’s just the other way round.” Then he added, “Most people are so nervous and uptight that grass is a real help to some sort of sanity.”