when you are struck, being what you are, you don’t turn the other cheek — ”

“No,” Dick interrupted quietly. “We immediately roar, ‘Knock his block off!’ and then do it. — She’s got us, Evan, hip and thigh. Philosophy, like religion, is what the man is, and is by him made in his own image.”

And while the talk led over the world, Paula sewed on, her eyes filled with the picture of the two big men, admiring, wondering, pondering, without the surety of self that was theirs, aware of a slipping and giving of convictions so long accepted that they had seemed part of her.

Later in the evening she gave voice to her trouble.

“The strangest part of it,” she said, taking up a remark Dick had just made,