Anne nodded thoughtfully. “I think Duke is right. You can tell what Jubal’s tastes in sculpture are by looking at the books in his study. But I doubt if it will help much.”

Nevertheless they looked, Anne and Jill and Mike, and Anne picked out three books as bearing evidence (to her eyes) of having been looked at most often. “Hmm . . .” she said. “It’s clear that the Boss would like anything by Rodin. Mike, if you could buy one of these for Jubal, which one would you pick? Oh, here’s a pretty one—‘Eternal Springtime.’”

Mike barely glanced at it and turned the page. “This one.”

“What?” Jill looked at it and shuddered. “Mike, that one is perfectly dreadful! I hope I die long before I look like that.”

“That is beauty,” Mike said firmly.

“Mike!” Jill protested. “You’ve got a depraved taste—you’re worse than Duke. Or else you just don’t know any better.”

Ordinarily such a rebuke from a water brother, most especially from Jill, would have shut Mike up, forced him to spend the following night in trying to understand his fault. But this was art in which he was sure of himself. The portrayed statue was the first thing he had seen on Earth which felt like a breath of home to him. Although it was clearly a picture of a human woman it gave him a feeling that a Martian Old One should be somewhere around, responsible for its creation. “It is beauty,” he insisted stubbornly. “She has her own face. I grok.”

“Jill,” Anne said slowly, “Mike is right.”

“Huh? Anne! Surely you don’t like that?”

“It frightens me. But Mike knows what Jubal likes. Look at the book itself. It falls open naturally to any one of three places. Now look at the pages—this page has been handled more than the other two. Mike has picked the Boss’s favorite. This other one—‘The Caryatid Who has Fallen under the Weight of Her Stone’—he likes almost as well. But Mike’s choice is Jubal’s pet.”

“I buy it,” Mike said decisively.

But it was not for sale. Anne telephoned the Rodin Museum in Paris on Mike’s behalf and only Gallic gallantry and her beauty kept them from laughing in her face. Sell one of the Master’s works? My dear lady, they are not only not for sale but they may not be reproduced. Non, non, non! Quelle idée!

But for the Man from Mars some things are possible which are not possible for others. Anne called Bradley; a couple of days later he called her back. As a compliment from the French government—no fee, but a strongly couched request that the present never be publicly exhibited—Mike would receive, not the original, but a full-size, microscopically-exact replica, a bronze photopantogram of “She Who Used to Be the Beautiful Heaulmière.”

Jill helped Mike select presents for the girls, here she knew her ground. But when he asked her what he should buy for her; she not only did not help but insisted that he must not buy her anything.

Mike was beginning to realize that, while a water brother always spoke rightly, sometimes they spoke more rightly than others, i.e., that the English language had depths to it and it was sometimes necessary to probe to reach the right depth. So he consulted Anne.

“Go ahead and buy her a present, dear. She has to tell you that . . . but you give her a present anyhow. Hmm . . .” Anne vetoed clothes and jewelry, finally selected for him a present which puzzled him—Jill already smelled exactly the way Jill should smell.

The small size and apparent unimportance of the present, when it arrived, added to his misgivings—and when Anne let him whiff it before having him give it to Jill, Mike was more in-doubt than ever; the odor was very strong and smelled not at all like Jill.

Nevertheless, Anne was right; Jill was delighted with the perfume and insisted on kissing him at once. In kissing her he grokked fully that this gift was what she wanted and that it made them grow closer.

When she wore it at dinner that night, he discovered that the fragrance truly did not differ from that of Jill herself; in some unclear fashion it simply made Jill smell more deliciously like Jill than ever. Still stranger, it caused Dorcas to kiss him and whisper, “Mike hon . . . the negligee is lovely and just what I wanted—but perhaps someday you’ll give me perfume?”

Mike could not grok why Dorcas would want it, since Dorcas did not smell at all like Jill and therefore perfume would not be proper for her . . . nor, he realized, would he want Dorcas to smell like Jill; he wanted Dorcas to smell like Dorcas.

Jubal interrupted with: “Quit nuzzling the lad and let him eat his dinner! Dorcas, you already reek like a Marseilles cat house; don’t wheedle Mike for more stinkum.”