"Go on, Lucilla," Dr. Andrews said, as she hesitated.

"That's all, just about. We finished the job and got rid of the
magazines and for a little while it was almost as if those two weeks
had never been, except I couldn't forget that he didn't know what I
was thinking at all, even when everything he did, almost, made it seem
as if he did. It began to seem wrong for me to know what he was
thinking. Crazy, like Mother had said, and worse, somehow. Not well,
not even nice, if you know what I mean."

"Then he asked you to marry him."

"And I said no, even when I wanted, oh, so terribly, to say yes and
yes and yes." She squeezed her eyes tight shut to hold back a rush of
tears.

* * * * *

Time folded back on itself. Once again, the hands of her wristwatch
pointed to 4:30 and the white-clad receptionist said briskly, "Doctor
will see you now." Once again, from some remote vantage point, Lucilla
watched herself brush past Dr. Andrews and cross to the familiar
couch, heard herself say, "It's getting worse," watched herself move
through a flickering montage of scenes from childhood to womanhood,
from past to present.

She opened he eyes to meet those of the man who sat patiently beside
her. "You see," he said, "telling me wasn't so difficult, after all."
And then, before she had decided on a response, "What do you know
about Darwin's theory of evolution, Lucilla?"

His habit of ending a tense moment by making an irrelevant query no
longer even startled her. Obediently, she fumbled for an answer. "Not
much. Just that he thought all the different kinds of life on earth
today evolved from a few blobs of protoplasm that sprouted wings or
grew fur or developed teeth, depending on when they lived, and where."
She paused hopefully, but met with only silence. "Sometimes what
seemed like a step forward wasn't," she said, ransacking her brain for
scattered bits of information. "Then the species died out, like the
saber-tooth tiger, with those tusks that kept right on growing until
they locked his jaws shut, so he starved to death." As she spoke, she
remembered the huge beast as he had been pictured in one of her
college textbooks. The recollection grew more and more vivid, until
she could see both the picture and the facing page of text. There was
an irregularly shaped inkblot in the upper corner and several heavily
underlined sentences that stood out so distinctly she could actually
read the words