"He's charming," Donald replied. "Just terribly, terribly charming. Would you mind getting on with it?"
"Please," Victor started to interrupt.
"Don't be modest, darling," Mimi went on. "So then I read a biography, and then another, and soon I was doing nothing but studying you. I fell in love with you, dear, I fell in love with you a thousand years after you were dead. You never married, you know, and you needed me, and I guess that helped, but at any rate I fell, and I fell all the way.
"We're not married, Donald and I. There's no sex then, so there's no need for marriage. Right, Donald? Right. But he was coming here on vacation and he was nice enough to take me along, and we had to fit in, so we came as husband and wife. Just a matter of convenience, really. But then we were here for all those months, and I didn't get to meet you, and something about this age just got into my bones, I loved it so, people really live now, not like back home. And I nearly forgot about you, Victor dear, although I can't understand that now, and all I wanted was to live here like a normal person, a normal wife. But he couldn't understand that. At any rate, I went native, I went whole hog native.
"And then it was time to go home. But I wasn't going. So I made up this story about forgetting everything and I pretended I thought he was nuts or something and he went and got you and suddenly there you were in my living room and it all came back, darling, it came back so fast and strong I thought I'd die on the spot. And I love you now, darling, I love you now and forever, and I won't go back alive, I swear that."
"Mimi," Donald begged, "think of the future. If you don't go back it'll be all upset. We can't have people just popping up in the past from the future, there has to be discipline. It's one thing to come here quietly for a few months of harmless vacation, and then just as quietly to disappear. But to settle down brazenly in another time, to ... to immigrate, as it were, well, it just can't be done. There's no precedent, just none at all. Nobody would think of doing such a thing. Why, who knows what would happen if you stayed here? It could upset the whole pattern of the future!"
"The future will just have to take care of itself," Mimi answered. "I love him, and you can't argue with that. There's nothing you can say that can argue with that. I don't care poof for the future."
Victor sat down quietly on the edge of the bed, he felt a bit weak around the general vicinity of the knees. Mimi stood up and strode over to the window, her back to the conversation. "Mimi," Donald pleaded, "just think of what you're doing. You'll lose your immortality, for one thing. You know, it's not something you're just born with, it's the result of careful medical science. Why, almost anything could happen to you here. They have all sorts of ugly diseases. And if you should last just a few years longer, just maybe fifty or sixty more years, your heart will almost certainly pop off. They don't have any sort of arterial rejuvenation now, nothing at all. You're trading immortality for a mere moment."