Now he was so excited that he forgot himself and tried to explain the whole thing to Rolanda. She seemed to listen with half an ear as she assembled breakfast. She didn't understand, or she misunderstood, or she understood but disapproved—Baxter wasn't at all certain which it was. When he finished she simply paused in her oatmeal dishing, pulled her housecoat tightly about her and said, "Nonsense! You went back to sleep after I got up. You're dreaming these things. It is high time that Annie began skipping her night feeding."
But her eyes were narrowed cat-slits, and Baxter felt a positive warning in them. He felt that since creation, probably no man had actually penetrated a woman's brain to probe the willy-nilly logic that functioned there:—functioned well, for somehow things got done, but functioned in such a topsy-turvy manner as to drive a serious male insane if he pondered it too long.
He retreated to the morning paper and said no more about it. Before he left for the golf club he had another remarkable experience. He stepped into the nursery and stared down at the adorable little pink-cheeked Annie. He closed his eyes and sought her mind—and saw himself standing above the crib—through her eyes! It was clear as a TV image. In fact he noted that he needed a shave and looked quite strange with his eyes closed.
In the days that followed Baxter became addicted to slipping into Annie's innocent little mind at almost any hour of her waking. At the office. In a customer's waiting room. Even out on the golf course while waiting for a slow foursome to tee off ahead. Distance was no obstacle to the telepathic rapport.
And he began to make fabulous plans. As Annie grew he would follow her mental progress, investigating every aspect of her thought processes to learn the key to womankind's inexplicable mind. Through her eyes and other senses he would experience the woman's world as it impinged upon her, and one day he would fathom the deepest, eternal secrets of all womanhood.
Whether Rolanda divined his intentions Baxter never knew, but when Annie was three months old she suddenly began resisting her father's mental intrusion.
He first noticed it one evening right after Annie had been tucked in for the night. Baxter was pretending to doze in his leather chair in the den, but actually he had been keeping mental watch until Rolanda cleared out of the nursery—for some reason he feared communing with Annie while his wife was in the room.
Rolanda had come out, down the hall, stopped in the open door of his den, and he had felt her gaze upon him for a long minute.
When she passed on without comment, Baxter sought to enter Annie's mind and enjoy her nightly snugged-down feeling of contentment. He probed gently, and to his surprise he met a barrier, an impalpable resistance, a shutting-out that he had never encountered. He pressed more firmly. Dim perceptions began to come through to him, but they were dominated by displeasure emotion.