‘Where the dickens that young woman goes . . . These modern girls. Sit AROUND. Drink gin and try to talk politics! Discuss Conditions and Situations. Never get any sleep. They’ll never have our pep at our age. When I was twenty-eight, like Sara . . . Brugluph!’

Hazel, with the rapture of an amateur nurse, had taken advantage of him by jamming the thermometer under his tongue. He sat slowly wobbling it with his lips, trying to continue his look of brave suffering, though by now he had almost forgotten from what he suffered. The sight of the black-rubber thermometer case in Hazel’s hand recalled to him a new grievance, and as soon as she had slid the glass tube out of his mouth, he exploded:

‘And another thing! You been using my fountain pen again! Oh, I can tell! The cap was on loose.’

She did not listen to this entirely justified charge. Like any other sound wife, she intended to go right on using his pen, as well as his razor and even his portable typewriter.

Studying the thermometer, she worried:

‘Fred! Darling! You HAVE got a fever!’

‘Whadie tell you!’

‘But it seems quite bad. If I make this thing out correctly, your temperature is a hundred and twenty degrees!’

‘You’re crazy! Gimme that thing! Hundred and twenty! If I had that, I’d be dead. I’ll show you.’

He sucked the thermometer again, removed it, glanced at it with the careless mastery of a veteran salesman, and howled, ‘Good heavens, girl, I HAVE got a temperature of a hundred and twenty! I’m dead as a doornail!’

Side by side, hands clinging, they sat worrying.

His lament had covered a sound of footsteps in the hall, and neither of them was conscious of their daughter till she stood in the door, demanding, like an inspector out raiding, ‘Why the wailing, Dad? What may all the trouble be?’

Pitifully, like a child showing a broken toy, Fred held up the thermometer, protesting, ‘I’ve got a temperature of a hundred and twenty!’

‘Oh, stuff!’ Sara was, at twenty-eight, a perfect Queen Elizabeth. (Her name had been Sarah until, as a junior in high school, she had decapitated it.) ‘You can’t even read a thermometer. A fine lot of good you’d be if you were over in China now, fighting. Couldn’t even care for the wounded. As untrained as Howard.’

‘I don’t intend to be over in China now, fighting, nor any other time, neither. The home talent there takes plenty care of that.’

‘Huh! Here, open your mouth, Dad.’

She stood regally tall, silver cape about her seal-brown evening frock, while Fred, not the meekest of little men, had his temperature taken for the third time within ten minutes.

The lady Storm Trooper firmly removed the thermometer, and crowed, ‘You haven’t even half a degree of temperature. What you need is more sleep — at your age. G’ night.’

She was gone, trailing behind her that magnificent intolerance.

Hazel looked at Fred, just looked, understandingly, and he trembled into speech: