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lane, came presently to the modest cabin isolated among the pines. Janet was sitting idly in the sun, crooning some sort of rambling lullaby to John Lennon Peacechild, who was sleeping sprawled across her by now considerable lap.
    “Have a good run?” she asked idly.
    “Yes.”
    “Go by the plant?”
    “Don’t I always?”
    “You really like that old plant,” she remarked, still in the same idle way.
    “What makes you think so?” he demanded, suddenly sharp; probably not a good idea, but she was too dumb to notice.
    “You’re always hanging around there.”
    “I do not ‘hang around there,’” he said with a measured emphasis, “so forget it.”
    “Okay, okay,” she said mildly. “Just noticing.”
    “Don’t notice. People get hurt noticing.”
    “Okay,” she said, finally sounding a little alarmed by his tone. “You don’t have to take my head off. What are you going to do now?”
    “Study,” he said as he started into the cabin.
    “You’re always studying,” she protested with a half-scornful laugh. “Anybody’d think you were going to be a lawyer, or something.”
    “Maybe I will,” he tossed over his shoulder. “The world could stand a few good ones who believe in doing the right thing. There aren’t too many of that kind who really care for the people.”
    “Lucky they have you,” she retorted dryly. He stopped dead, turned on his heel and came back to the doorway.
    “Don’t be so God damned smart,” he snapped. “I tell you, people get hurt like that.”
    “Just commenting,” she said, retreating into the kind of shrugging indifference she showed when he lost his temper: which was more often as the appointed day approached. “You’re getting awfully touchy, lately. Worried about something?”
    “No, I’m not ‘worried about something’! What would I be worried about?”
    “I don’t know,” she said, turning to nurse John Lennon Peacechild, who had been awakened by his father’s angry tone and was beginning to cry. “And,” she added spitefully, “I don’t care.”
    “Keep it that way,” he said and turned and went in, slamming the flimsy screen door behind him.
    There was silence except for an occasional pleased gurgle from the baby.
    Just get over the next couple of weeks, he told himself.
    Don’t fly off the handle.
    Don’t get her curious.
    Just keep it cool.
    Keep it cool.
    It was the only way.

    “It doesn’t say,” the Chief Justice remarked when he finished reading the wire-service copy his chief clerk had placed discreetly in his hand as they entered the dining room, “whom he has in mind as our new Associate. Or”—he smiled at Justice McIntosh—“what gender. Next thing we know, we may have to establish a ladies’ gym.”
    “I wouldn’t mind the company,” she said, “but I don’t remember any speculation about a female appointee in the last few days. I think you men can continue to lord it over me.”
    “That will be the day!” Hughie Demsted exclaimed with an amused shake of his handsome black head as they took their seats informally around the dining table. “I thought Archie Gilbert of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals was the front-runner, Dunc.”
    “Sue-Ann and I were at Henry Randall’s last night for dinner,” Justice Pomeroy said, naming the shrewd legal mind who was senior Senator from Virginia and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, “and the guessing there seemed to center around Taylor Barbour. For what it’s worth.”
    Rupert Hemmelsford, who had been chairman of Judiciary himself before his appointment to the Court, blinked his eyebrows and assumed the disapproving look he got when contemplating the highly intelligent, highly effective, much-publicized forty-six-year-old Secretary of Labor. “Henry’s a good weathervane,” he said, “but I’m not so sure I can work very well with Tay Barbour. I don’t anticipate he’ll have any trouble with Senate confirmation, though. I’d guess two days of