And with a half sigh she said: "You talk of the wind. Do you know even the wind is a little blue?"

He glanced away from her into his can of green paint. The movement was a retreat, as though his ignorance put her in a place he feared to pursue.

"When I was a child," she said, "I used to say the wind was blue. But I couldn't prove it to anyone. I'd watch and watch for a trace of it. But it was always too quick. Somehow feeling it you knew. Somehow. And you wanted to reach out and touch it too. And the sound of it was like I'd imagine loneliness to sound if you could hear loneliness. It's blue, but if you call it blue it isn't—rather better to call it a blueishness; a kind of hygienic blue, if you please. Yes." Mrs. Timothy thought, "it pushes the blue surf like skirts so that the lacey foam of petticoats show. The swirl of skirts on dancers without bodies." And she thought of her landlady Mrs. Deming again: she who knew the body without the dance. A pensive smile flirted about Mrs. Timothy's lips. The last she'd heard, Paula had gone to the coast. "It was right for her," Mrs. Timothy thought. "She belonged near the water." Mrs. Timothy could imagine Paula standing barefoot in purple-wet sand; her hair laboring with wind.

She remembered Arthur then, before their marriage. Though he may have seen much of the world, he had innocent, doe-like eyes; eyes that did not seem to grasp, like sunlight that peers blindly into dark places and remains still pure pure and warm even in dark places.

"See?" he said. "That's a nice green aint it: like the water my brother's missis drownded herself in." The words grated over his rough tobacco-colored voice; seemed to spring from some dank, dark place that made the sounds grey and soggy. He drew up close to her so that she was peering at the fine red lines in his eyes, and the filous lavender veins creeping immobile over his sallow cheeks. She could smell the odor of used tobacco smoke that seemed to permeate him. She moved her head back slowly; away imperceptibly.

"Poor gal," he said, "married the wrong brother. If I'd've married her it wouldn't've happened."

"I'm sorry, Biff. Were those your plans before she married him?"

"No, I wasn't fixing to. but I say, if I'd've married her it wouldn't've happened."

Mrs. Timothy tried to laugh. "Biff, if you had married Wally Simpson, King Edward the Eighth might not have abdicated either."

"I wouldn't know," he said.

A long purple scar skidded in a curve across the barren expanse of his narrow face and came to a sudden halt at the corners of his hard parched lips, flaked with little crusts of egg, presumably some of which he had consumed that mornning. The scar was the kind of mark peculiar to his breed, Mrs. Timothy thought. Most people carried their scar inside, but his was exposed; naked, for all the world to see. Indignation came from this thought.

"No," she said decidedly. "I want blue in that green." And she made the very color audible. "Please," she said. "That's not asking too much, is it? a little blue?"

"Must be the way your mister . . ." he stopped; sent a neat arrow of spit through his teeth and leaned up against the shingle house. He wiped his forehead with the palm of a paint-stained hand. "Other women like green-plain, common, ord'nary green. They got green cars, green lawns, green bedrooms, green . . ." As he talked two white threads of saliva came up from the soft, thick marsh-bottom of lip to upper teeth like harp strings. Mrs. Timothy didn't

one