ddened a trifle, and said slowly, "It also
happens, Dixon, that many years ago in Amsterdam, Haskel van Manderpootz
and de Lisle d'Agrion were--very friendly--more than friendly, I might
say, but for the fact that two such powerful personalities as the Dragon
Fly and van Manderpootz were always at odds." He frowned. "I was almost
her second husband. She's had seven, I believe; Denise is the daughter
of her third."

"Why--why is she coming here?"

"Because," he said with dignity, "van Manderpootz is here. I am still a
friend of de Lisle's." He turned and bent over the complex device on the
table. "Hand me that wrench," he ordered. "Tonight I dismantle this, and
tomorrow start reconstructing it for Isaak's head."

* * * * *

But when, the following week, I rushed eagerly back to van Manderpootz's
laboratory, the idealizator was still in place. The professor greeted me
with a humorous twist to what was visible of his bearded mouth. "Yes,
it's still here," he said, gesturing at the device. "I've decided to
build an entirely new one for Isaak, and besides, this one has afforded
me considerable amusement. Furthermore, in the words of Oscar Wilde, who
am I to tamper with a work of genius. After all, the mechanism is the
product of the great van Manderpootz."

He was deliberately tantalizing me. He knew that I hadn't come to hear
him discourse on Isaak, or even on the incomparable van Manderpootz.
Then he smiled and softened, and turned to the little inner office
adjacent, the room where Isaak stood in metal austerity. "Denise!" he
called, "come here."

I don't know exactly what I expected, but I do know that the breath left
me as the girl entered. She wasn't exactly my image of the ideal, of
course; she was perhaps the merest trifle slimmer, and her eyes--well,
they must have been much like those of de Lisle d'Agrion, for they were
the clearest emerald I've ever seen. They were impudently direct eyes,
and I could imagine why van Manderpootz and the Dragon Fly might have
been forever quarreling; that was easy to imagine, looking into the eyes
of the Dragon Fly's daughter.

Nor was Denise, apparently, quite as femininely modest as my image of
perfection. She wore the extremely unconcealing costume of the day,
which covered, I suppose, about as much of her as one of the one-piece
swimming suits of the middle years of the twentieth century. She gave an
impression, not so much of fleeting grac