“When will that be?”

“Next year.”

She would never have Liz’s driven sensuality, he knew, and yet she was so much more desirable to him. So dear. He had been careful not to touch her, and he made no move to touch her now.

“I don’t want to wait until next year, Adam,” she said steadily.

He considered talking to someone in the Psychiatry Department at the hospital and then he remembered that Gerry Thornton, who had been a classmate in medical school, was now at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. He telephoned him and exchanged greetings and five minutes of gossip about the whereabouts of others.

“Ah—Did you call me with anything particular in mind?” Thornton asked him finally.

“Well, as a matter of fact,” he said. “I have a friend. A very close friend who has a problem, and I thought it would be nice to chat about it with someone both congenial and psychoanalyzed.”

“Actually, I still have several years of my own analysis left,” Thornton said scrupulously. And waited.

“Gerald, if your schedule is tight it doesn’t have to be this week . . .”

“Adam,” Thornton said reproachfully. “If I came to you with an acute appendix, would you ask me to wait until next week? How about Thursday?”

“Lunch?”

“Oh, I think my office would be better,” Thornton said.

“. . . So you see,” he said. “What I’m concerned about is the possibility that our affair will do her harm.”

“Well, of course I don’t know the girl. But I think it’s safe to say that if she’s seriously involved and you’re just screwing around, if you will pardon the phrase . . .”

“That isn’t the case. But I want to know, you smart-ass Freudian psychiatrist, what a long, drawn-out affair will do to a girl suffering from what appears to be a definite hypochondriasis.”

“Hmm. Well, I can’t diagnose for her any more than you can tell over the telephone whether a patient has carcinoma.” Thornton reached for the tobacco and began to fill his pipe. “You say her parents are divorced?”

Adam nodded. “She’s been cut off from both of them for some time.”

“Well, it might have been that, of course. We’re slowly learning something about imaginary illness. Some family doctors have estimated that as many as eight out of every ten patients in their waiting rooms are there for psychosomatic reasons. Their pain is just as real as any other patient’s, of course, but it’s caused by the mind, not the body.” He struck a match and puffed. “Do you know the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning?”

“Some of it.”

“There are some lines she wrote to her dog, Fluff.”

“I think the dog’s name was Flush.”

Thornton looked annoyed. “That’s right, Flush.” He went to a bookcase and pulled down a volume and searched the pages. “Here it is.

But of thee it shall be said,