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Show 169 stirred the longer wisps of uncombed beard at his cheek. "Is he a good neighbor?" He could go on like this all night, he thought. His lower lip hung mere inches from the soft earlobe half-hidden behind a curtain of hair. "You mean does he have loud parties or anything? He doesn't live right next door." "No, I mean does he buy stolen merchandise? Fences make good neighbors, ha ha." She drew back and looked at him. Then she crinkled her eyes again. "I'll ask him when we go home," she said. The proximity of mouth to ear was not necessary, and he worried she would notice that. The music alone-1t was still the first movement-provided an adequate wall around any close conversation that no one else was interested in listening to anyway. At an adjacent table someone was explaining about Skinner boxes, and Harry had turned sideways in his chair to watch. Shannon's attention had wandered to a collection of slides someone had brought of children's murals on display at the County Museum and was holding up to the hanging lamp, one by one. Lorin put his arms on the table and rested his head on them, forcing her to bend low in order to be heard. Behind the wall of music, his expression carefully tempered to look interested, he learned useful things about her. She was not an artist, he learned. She did not dance or write poetry. She was a senior in biology though this was only her third year. She was part of a special Dean's Test Group for gifted students and had been put on an accelerated schedule. Someone had probably stepped on her IBM card with a hobnail boot, she said (clearly not for the first time). She thought beatniks were interesting but were conformists in their own way. Didn't he? She was from El Centro-that was in the Imperial |