ee table. After Judith left him, Philip
set his brief case on the floor and sat down in one of the chairs. He
wondered idly how she expected to make the trip to Pfleugersville. He
had seen no car in the driveway, and there was no garage on the property
in which one could be concealed. Moreover, it was highly unlikely that
buses serviced the village any more. Valleyview had been bypassed quite
some time ago by one of the new super-duper highways. He shrugged.
Getting to Pfleugersville was her problem, not his.

He returned his attention to the living room. It was a large room. The
house was large, too--large and Victorianesque. Judith, apparently, had
opened the back door, for a breeze was wafting through the downstairs
rooms--a breeze laden with the scent of flowers and the dew-damp breath
of growing grass. He frowned. The month was October, not June, and since
when did flowers bloom and grass grow in October? He concluded that the
scent must be artificial.

Zarathustra was regarding him with large golden eyes from the middle of
the living-room floor. The animal did somehow bring to mind a little old
man, although he could not have been more than two or three years old.
"You're not very good company," Philip said.

"Ruf," said Zarathustra, and turning, trotted through an archway into a
large room that, judging from the empty shelves lining its walls, had
once been a library, and thence through another archway into another
room--the dining room, undoubtedly--and out of sight.

Philip leaned back wearily in the armchair he had chosen. He was beat.
Take six days a week, ten hours a day, and multiply by fifty-two and you
get three hundred and twelve. Three hundred and twelve days a year,
hunting down clients, talking, walking, driving, expounding; trying in
his early thirties to build the foundation he should have begun building
in his early twenties--the foundation for the family he had suddenly
realized he wanted and someday hoped to have. Sometimes he wished that
ambition had missed him altogether instead of waiting for so long to
strike. Sometimes he wished he could have gone right on being what he
once had been. After all, there was nothing wrong in living in cheap
hotels and even cheaper rooming houses; there was nothing wrong in being
a lackadaisical door-to-door salesman with run-down heels.

Nothing wrong, that is, except the aching want that came over you
sometimes, and the loneliness of long and empty evening