And we got off and pretended we were lost. We went into pawnshops and looked at second hand diamond rings, whose fires were dimmed by the grimy sweat of the pawnbroker's fingers and the secret knowledge they held within their secret carbon heart of broken romances and marriages, and poverty that had led their former owners here to exchange a dream that had shattered for a week's rent in a fourth rate hotel.
We bought a newspaper from a blind man, and had a coke in a corner drugstore while we read it and worried about the world situation, and a gaunt thing with brown bags under her eyes told the patient druggist all her symptoms in a whining monotone.
We looked in windows at fur coats marked down from four hundred and ninety-nine ninety-five. We bought a sack of popcorn in an automatic vending machine that cheated on the amount, and fought over it until it skidded out of our hands onto the sidewalk. We had our picture taken together in a twenty-five cent booth, pretending to each other it wasn't so we could sit with our heads together.
When our feet grew reluctant we looked about us and discovered we were back home, and wondered with real surprise how that had happened, and how our feet had known without us knowing.
I half turned to retreat, feeling a panic and a sense of having left something undone or unsaid that should have been said. Paula was looking at me, her eyes troubled, and suddenly I knew she felt the same way, only there was a basic difference. She was holding back her feelings about her father shuffling off his mortal body for an imperishable one of non-living matter. And I? The thought fled fearfully into my subconscious. There could be no turning back, whatever the price.
I took Paula's hand, patted the side of her face until her smile brightened again. Hand in hand we slowly walked toward the house, our eyes on the drawn curtains of the study window behind which waited a man whom I had grown to hate even more than I loved his daughter.
The laboratory was a two story building in back of the house, reached by a narrow sidewalk in the grudging space the builders had left between the two. I paused at the door after the doctor had opened it and gone in. Paula was still at the kitchen door where we had left her, her eyes round with unvoiced protest and mute appeal.
"Are you coming?" the doctor's voice protested my delay.
"O.K.," I said, stepping inside and closing the door.