She stared at him in the mirror, bemused at his rare display of affection. “You’re lucky; men don’t have this problem.”

“Men also suffer from the maladies of age and crow’s-feet. “What makes women think we, don’t crack at the seams, too?”

“The difference is, you don’t care.”

“We’re more prone to accept the inevitable,” he said, smiling. “Speaking of the inevitable, when are you going to have a baby?”

“You bastard! You never give up, do you?” She threw a hairbrush on the dressing table, knocking a regiment of evenly spaced bottles of artificial beauty about the glass top. “We’ve been through all this a thousand times. I won’t subject myself to the indignities of pregnancy. I won’t swish crap-laden diapers around in a toilet bowl ten times a day. Let someone else populate the earth. I’m not about to split off my soul, like some damned amoeba.”

“Those reasons are phony. You don’t honestly believe them yourself.”

She turned back to the mirror and made no reply.

“A baby could save us, Dana,” he said gently.

She dropped her head in her hands. “I won’t give up my career any more than you’ll give up your precious project.”

He stroked her soft golden hair and gazed at her image in the mirror. “Your father was an alcoholic who deserted his family when you were only ten. Your mother worked behind a bar and brought men home to earn extra drinking money. You and your brother were treated like animals until you were both old enough to run away from the garbage bin you called home. He turned crud and started holding up liquor stores and gas stations; a nifty little occupation that netted him a murder conviction and life imprisonment at San Quentin. God knows, I’m proud of how you lifted yourself from the sewer and worked eighteen hours a day to put yourself through college and grad school. Yes, you had a rotten childhood, Dana, and you’re afraid of having a baby because of your memories. You’ve got to understand your nightmare doesn’t belong to the future; you can’t deny a son or daughter their chance at life.”

The stone wall remained unbreached. She shook off his hands and furiously began plucking her brows. The discussion was closed; she had shut him out as conclusively as if she had caused him to vanish from the room.

When Seagram emerged from the shower, Dana was standing in front of a full-length closet mirror. She studied herself as critically as a designer who was seeing a finished creation for the first time. She wore a simple white dress that clung tightly to her torso before falling away to the ankles. The décolletage was loose and offered a more than ample view of her breasts.

“You’d better hurry,” she said casually. It was as though the argument had never happened. “We don’t want to keep the President waiting.”

“There will be over two hundred people there. No one will stick a black star on our attendance chart for being tardy.”