A warm, motherly widow of nearly eighty, Mrs. Ames had been the residence's owner for a decade, and had taken a great deal of vicarious pleasure in Ann's romance with the captain. "It's so different," she said once to Hunter, "your faith in each other, the way you work together for a goal you both want. If the rest of us could only learn to have some honest affection for each other. But, there, I'm an old woman, living too much in the past."
As soon as Hunter saw her face on the screen, he knew that something was wrong. She was tense and nervous, tied in the emotional knots of an anxiety neurosis. And Mrs. Ames was not the woman to fall easy victim to mental illness. If Hunter had been guessing the odds, he would have put her adjustment index on a par with his own.
"I haven't seen Ann for a month," she told him.
"Where is she? My last micropic from her said something about a commission-job—"
"She's all right, Max. Did you join the U.F.W.?"
"I'll be damned if I will."
Why had she asked him that? Her question seemed totally unrelated to her reassurance as to Ann—another clear symptom of her emotional unbalance.
"About Ann, Mrs. Ames," he persisted. "Do you know what clinic gave her the commission?"
Mrs. Ames stared at him in surprise. "Ann didn't tell you in her micropic?"
"We use a personal code," he explained. "That makes a certain type of communication extremely difficult."