Thunder and Roses by Theodore Sturgeon Read Free Book Online

marketed all these?”
    “Yes, or patented or copyrighted them.”
    “Oh Robin, I’m
so
glad! Are you getting results?”
    “Am I?” The old, lovely, wondering look came into his face. “Peg, people are crazy. They just give money away. I honestly don’t have to think about money any more. That is, I never did; but now I tell people my account number and ask them to send their check to it for deposit, and they keep piling it in, and I can’t cash enough checks to keep up with it. When are you going to ask me why I’ve been keeping away from you?”
    The abruptness of the question took Peg’s breath away. It was all she had been thinking about, and it was the reason she had accepted his invitation. She colored. “Frankly, I didn’t know how to lead up to it.”
    “You didn’t have to lead up to it,” he said, smiling gravely. “You know that, Peg.”
    “I suppose I know it. Well—why?”
    “You like the eatments?” He indicated the colorful dishes on the coffee table.
    “Delicious, and simply lovely to look at. But—”
    “It’s like that. This isn’t food for hungry people. Canapés like these are carefully designed to appeal to all five senses—if you delight in the crunch of good zwieback the way I do, and include hearing.”
    She stared at him. “I think I’m being likened to a … a smörgasbord!”
    He laughed. “The point I’m making is that a hungry man will go for this kind of food as happily as any other. The important thing to him is that it’s food. If he happens to like the particular titillations offered by such food as this, he will probably look back on his gobbling with some regret, later, when his appetite for food is satisfied and his psychic—artistic, if you like—hungers can be felt.” Robin grinned suddenly. “This is a wayward and wandering analogy, I know; but it does express why I kept away from you.”
    “It does?”
    “Yes, of course. Look, Peg, I can see what’s happening to me even if I am the patient. I wonder why so many doctors overlook that? You can play around with my metabolism and my psychology and ultimately affect such an abstract as my emotional maturity. But there’s one thing you can’t touch—and that is my own estimate ofthe things I have learned. My sense of values. You can change my approach to these things, but not the things themselves. One such thing is that I have a violent reaction against sordidness, no matter how well justified the sordidness may have been when I did the sordid thing, whatever it was. In the past, primarily the justification has been the important thing. Now—and by ‘now’ I mean since I started these treatments—the reaction is more important. So I avoid sordidness because I don’t want to live through the reaction afterward, and not so much because I dislike doing a sordid thing.”
    “That’s a symptom of maturity,” said Peg. “But what has it to do with me?”
    “I was hungry,” he said simply. “So hungry I couldn’t see straight. And suddenly so full of horse sense that I wouldn’t reach for the pretty canapés until I could fully appreciate them. And now—sit down, Peg!”
    “I … have to go,” she said in a throttled voice.
    “Oh, you’re wrong,” he said, not moving. He spoke very quietly. “You don’t have to go. You haven’t been listening to me. You’re defensive when I’ve laid no siege. I have just said that I’m incapable of doing anything in bad taste—that is, anything which will taste bad to me, now or later. And you are behaving as if I had said the opposite. You are thinking with your emotions instead of your intellect.”
    Slowly, she sank back into her chair. “You take a great deal for granted,” she said coldly.
    “That, in effect, is what the bread and cheese and pimentos and olives told me when I told them about these trays,” he said. “Oh, Peg, let’s not quarrel. You know that all I’ve just said is true. I could candy-coat all my phrases, talk for