Virgil, among his trusted novelists, in the room he rented around the corner from his wife, who had no time for novelists or their works, fell to wondering about a problem for novelists: what happens? Why am I writing this part of a novel, which even the most tolerant reader will hurry through as necessary but unsemantic, a formality like nine tenths of our waking life. A baseless inheritance from novelists of the past. Titus showed him a passage from his new novel that was giving him some trouble:

"And—"

Well, exactly. And what? Where do we go from and?

On a visit to his wife's house in search of clues: there she is, busy. Hissing as she writes, or at least reading beneath her breath the crucial syllables, which usually contain s's. "His collections of bile", it sounds like.

A little later he is confronted by someone who wants a loan.

"I'm not sure you understand how it works," he says. "It's not like free money".

Does the man know how anything works? He studied the other's narrow head and tried to judge what might be going on in there in the way of acountability. And—