Fate was dealing from the bottom of the deck.

Two young ladies, in toreador pants and mohair sweaters, whose swirling coiffures looked as though they had been squeezed from an icing gun, had ranged themselves at the fountain.

I used to pride myself on being impervious to the sentimentalities of soap opera, but when that loveliest of actresses, Rachel Gurney, of Upstairs, Downstairs, perished on the Titanic, I wept so convulsively and developed such anorexia that I had to be force-fed.

By the time I reach the hotel, my frustration is such that I compensate with a Gargantuan tea of watercress sandwiches, rock buns, and pastry that utterly ruin my digestion. It makes for a stimulating afternoon.

The only solution is to plow everything under and live on pie.

Call me uxorious, spoony, passion's plaything, but let a woman signify her whim by so much as a nod and, by George, I'll climb the highest mountain, swim the deepest ocean to gratify it.

In the same instant, as I straightened up, giddy with the effort of extricating a mullein from the cucumbers, I realized that the spiny coiffure was in actuality a home permanent and the bulging expanse of gingham below it the rest of Mrs. Kozlich, our current cleaning woman.

The Milky Way, the hotel where I was scheduled to stay in Las Vegas and whose floor show Fauntleroy was currently headlining, was the town's newest-a vast, foolish beehive of plate glass rearing fifteen stories above the sagebrush, so ruthlessly air-condi-tioned that I was wheezing like an accordion by the time I unpacked.

Within seconds her tongue thawed out and began whirring like a dental drill. She knew as if it were the Koran everything Mr. Hemingway had written-better than he did himself, she hazarded archly.

Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws.