The water was turned off. He was silent inside the stall. Then his voice came over the partition. “John—”

“Yes?”

“Mind if I ask you something?”

“Not at all, Cliff.”

“Tell me.” He sounded grave. “Are you happily married?”

“Am I?” Grandin had to adjust himself to the unexpectedness of the question. He did not for a moment think Hauman had been perceptive enough to gather that he and Ethel had had a quarrel; he knew there was something quite different back of it. Indeed, the question had been almost a rhetorical one. “Why, yes,” he answered at last; “very, I should say.” He pondered—not the question itself but what had made Hauman bring it up. “Why do you ask?”

“Oh”—the answer was offhand, matter-­of-­fact—“no reason, specially.”

“Did you think we weren’t?”

“No, not for a second, honest. I was thinking of something else. Somebody else’s marriage, I mean. Fellow I know.”

He stepped from the shower, sat down on the wooden bench, and began to dry himself. As Grandin watched, he began to be oppressed by a melancholy uneasiness. Hauman’s question had provoked a few questions of his own. He felt an overmastering compulsion to inquire of things he had no right to inquire about: questions concerning that secret life sitting over there on the bench which he would never really know or reach, which was mysterious, alien, and remote from his own, and which would one day die. With inward despair, he checked himself, unsatisfied, because what he wanted to know would have been so unseemly to ask. . . . And in another moment he heard himself saying: “The thing I’ve been thinking is: you and Billie can’t very well afford to have children at this point—can you? I mean of course if you’re going back into the service.”

“Well, I don’t know, John; I guess it wouldn’t be so good.”

“What about children, Cliff?”

“What about them, John?”

“I don’t wish to interfere, but— Does Billie—or do you— That is, would you care to have me suggest—”

“Oh, I see. Well, don’t worry about it, John, it’s all taken care of.”