Flory crossed the brick-like earth of the yard between the hospital sheds. All down the wide verandas, on sheetless charpoys, rows of grey-faced men lay silent and moveless.

A world-class pussy bandit, Micah had experienced marriage as a seven-year montage of chorus singers and starlets, secretaries and schoolteachers, cigarette girls and cocktail waitresses, all of them happily hopping into his lap, a pinwheeling collage of legs waving from taxicab windows, lewd acts performed in commissary bathrooms and the back of darkened screening rooms, the entire apparatus of moviemaking at times seeming less about money and craftsmanship than a riot of unrestrained coupling.

When Dandy Dinmont, after executing two or three caprioles, and cutting the Highland-fling, by way of ridicule of his wife's anxiety, at last deigned to sit down, and commit his round, black, shaggy bullet of a head to her inspection.

The property, nothing but a ruined skeleton of a house and overgrown fields, had come on the market while they were still in college, but Ben had immediately pictured his forever house located there.