"I don't like the guy," Vic said bluntly, looking back at the evening paper.
"Since when don't you like him? I thought you thought he was very interesting."
"He is '—very'," Vic said. He listened to Melinda's silence for few moments. She was standing by the sofa, shifting restlessly from foot to foot now. And she was in one of her few pairs of high-heeled shoes, because Mr. Carpenter was tall.
"And since when do you say who's coming to the house and who isn't?" Melinda asked in a still-controlled voice, feeling him out.
"Since now I don't happen to like him. I'm very sorry. I don't feel like discussing it. Can't you see him at his house or out somewhere? He's not going to be here much longer anyway, is he?"
"No. I don't think he is. Maybe two weeks."
Vic smiled at his paper, then turned the smile at her. Two weeks more on his payroll, he thought. He was tempted to let Melinda know now that he knew Mr. Carpenter was on his payroll, but a perverseness kept him from it. "Well, we'll all miss him, won't we?"
"I don't say 'we'll' miss him," Melinda said.
"Perhaps there'll be another along soon," he said, and he felt her bristle.
She lighted a cigarette and threw her lighter down on a seat cushion of the sofa. "You're in a lovely mood tonight, aren't you? Hospitable, gracious—courteous. All the things you boast about being."
"I've never boasted about being those things." He glanced at her. She looked frightened. "All right, Melinda, I'm sorry. I have nothing at all against Mr. Carpenter. He's very pleasant. He's a very nice young man."
"You sound as if you don't mean that."
"Do I? I'm sorry" He was striking a curious note between sentimental concern and overt hostility. He found himself smiling. "Let's forget about it, shall we? What's for dinner?"
"I want to know that I can ask him to the house, if I care to, without your being rude."
Vic swallowed. It wasn't Melinda, he thought, and it wasn't Mr. Carpenter himself, it was the principle of the thing. Again he felt the uncontrollable smile of habit. "Of course you can bring him to the house, honey I'm sorry I lost my temper." He waited. "When would you like to have him again? Were you thinking of asking him for dinner soon?"
"You don't have to overdo it!" Melinda was playing nervously with a string in her hand, yanking it taut again and again around one finger.
Let the string go, Vic told himself, though it annoyed him unreasonably. "What's for dinner, honey? Would you like me to fix it?"
She started toward the kitchen suddenly. "I'll go and fix it," she said.
There was a condition in his head which suggested the image dark treetops beaten violently in all directions by the wind. When he anticipated his actions, he imagined knocking ashtrays off tables as he reached for them, crushing snails' shells as he picked them up, because of a lack of control, but these things never happened. He watched his hands and they moved smoothly and precisely, as they always had, smallish, plump, innocuous hands, clear as a doctor's hands, except when he got ink on them at the printing plant from handling this and that in the pressroom. The snails still loved his hands, crawling slowly but unhesitatingly onto the forefinger that he extended to them, even when they were not lured by a scrap of lettuce held within their short vision.
He finally realized what the image of the beaten treetops was. It was a very distinct memory that he had of a storm coming up over a mountain in Austria. He had been about ten years old. His father had been alive, and he and his mother and father had been on one of their yearly trips to Europe. His father had been a consulting engineer in gyrostatics, a man with an ample private income, though he had gone through the pretense of working all his life, of being a man whose main interests were the practical ones of earning a living which he did not need and of pursuing a career whose progress could not have been of vital importance to him. Vic remembered very well: his father had finished a period of two or three weeks' work in Paris, and their going to Munich and Salzburg had been part of a holiday before they came home. They had gone to an absolutely fairy-tale-like hotel on the St. Wolfgangsee, Vic thought, or had it been the Fuschlsee? And it had been winter—no snow on the ground yet, but they had been expecting it any moment, and then the storm had come up over the mountains outside their window. Vic remembered the deep-set windows, and the fact that, for all the thickness of the walls of the hotel, he had been cold, and that there had been nothing they could do about it because, whatever the heating facilities of the hotel had been, they hadn't been adequate. His father, extremely polite man, burdened by his sense of financial superiority to almost everyone else, would have suffered a much colder temperature in the room before he would have complained. 'Richesse oblige'. The storm had come, advancing over the mountains, which themselves had looked ominously close and black, like an insuperable dark giant of unknown dimensions. And the trees silhouetted on the mountain tops had bent this way and that, as tortured by the crazy, brooding wind or as if trying to uproot themselves to flee from it. His father had said in a voice that betrayed his own excitement, “There’s snow in that cloud," though the cloud had been nearly black, so black that their hotel room had become as dark as if it were evening. And when the black cloud had decided to roll down the mountain toward them, making a roaring chaos of
