nwiddie and Osborne
would soon be appearing as gay young sparks on her doorstep. It might
be the greatest discovery of all time, but it certainly would work both
ways. While its economic value might be indisputable, and even, as she
had suggested, its spiritual, it would be hard on the merely young.
The mutual hatreds of capital and labor would sink into insignificance
before the antagonism between authentic youth and age inverted. On the
other hand it might mean the millennium. The threat of
overpopulation--for man's architectonic powers were restored if not
woman's; to say nothing of his prolonged sojourn--would at last rouse
the law-makers to the imperious necessity of eugenics, birth control,
sterilization of the unfit, and the expulsion of undesirable races. It
might even stimulate youth to a higher level than satisfied it at
present. Human nature might attain perfection.

However, he was in no mood for abstract speculation. His own problem
was absorbing enough.

He might as well itemize the questions he had to face and examine them
one by one, and dispassionately. He would never feel more emotionless
than now; and that mental state was very rare that enabled a man to
think clearly and see further than a yard ahead of him.

Her real age? Could he ever forget it? Should he not always see the
old face under the new mask, as the X-Rays revealed man's hideous
interior under its merciful covering of flesh? But he knew that one of
the most beneficent gifts bestowed upon mankind is the talent for
forgetting. Particularly when one object has been displaced by
another. Reiteration dulls the memory. He might say to himself every
hour in the day that she was sixty not thirty and the phrase would soon
become as meaningless as absent-minded replies to remarks about the
weather.

And he doubted if any man could look at Mary Zattiany for three
consecutive minutes and recall that she had ever been old, or imagine
that she ever could be old again. However prone man may be to dream,
he is, unless one of the visionaries, dominated by the present. What
he wants he wants now and he wants what he sees, not what may be
lurking in the future. That is the secret of the early and often
imprudent marriage--the urge of the race. And if a man is not deterred
by mere financial considerations, still less is he troubled by visions
of what his inamorata will look like thirty years hence or what she
might have looked like had