"Of course. Where did you think I'd be?"
"But I thought--I mean the ticket office--"
She set down the bundles and kissed me and looked up into my eyes,
almost smiling, half reproachful. "You didn't really think I'd go
running off with something out of a lab, did you?"
"Then--you knew?"
"Certainly I knew, silly. You didn't do a very good job of instructing
him, either. You gave him far too much latitude. Let him have ideas of
his own and all that. And next thing I knew, he was trying to get me to
run off with him to Hawaii or someplace."
"Bermuda," I said.
And then Marge was in my arms, kissing me and snuggling her cheek
against my chest.
"Even though he looked like you, I knew he couldn't be," she said. "He
was like you, but he wasn't _you_, darling. And all I ever want is you.
I just never appreciated you before...."
I held her close and tried to keep my hands from shaking. George
Faircloth, Idiot, I thought. She'd never been more beautiful. "But what
did you do with him?"
"I sent him back to the factory, naturally. They said they could blot
him out and use him over again. But let's not talk about that any more.
We've got more interesting things to discuss."
Maybe we had, but we didn't waste a lot of time talking. It was the
Marge I'd once known and I was beginning to wonder how I could have
been so wrong about her. In fact unless my memory was getting awfully
porous, the old Marge was _never_ like this--
I kissed her tenderly and ran my hands through her hair, and felt
the depression with my fore-finger, and then I knew what had really
happened.
That Marge always had been a sly one.