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b'\n"No."\n\n"I\'ve meant to talk to you about her. Strange."\n\n"Oh, I know the one you mean."\n\n"I thought you would."\n\n"Her," said Mildred in the dark room.\n\n"What about her?" asked Montag.\n\n"I meant to tell you. Forgot. Forgot."\n\n"Tell me now. What is it?"\n\n"I think she\'s gone."\n\n"Gone?"\n\n"Whole family moved out somewhere. But she\'s gone for good. I think she\'s dead."\n\n"We couldn\'t be talking about the same girl."\n\n"No. The same girl. McClellan. McClellan. Run over by a car. Four days ago. I\'m not sure. But I think she\'s dead. The family moved out anyway. I don\'t know. But I think she\'s dead.\n\n"You\'re not sure of it!"\n\n"No, not sure. Pretty sure."\n\n"Why didn\'t you tell me sooner?"\n\n"Forgot."\n\n"Four days ago!"\n\n"I forgot all about it."\n\n"Four days ago," he said, quietly, lying there.\n\nThey lay there in the dark room not moving, either of them. "Good night," she said.\n\nHe heard a faint rustle. Her hand moved. The electric thimble moved like a praying mantis on the pillow, touched by her hand. Now it was in her ear again, humming.\n\nHe listened and his wife was singing under her breath.\n\nOutside the house, a shadow moved, an autumn wind rose up and faded away. But there was something else in the silence that he heard. It was like a breath exhaled upon the window. It was like a faint drift of greenish luminescent smoke, the motion of a single huge October leaf blowing across the lawn and away.\n\nThe Hound, he thought. It\'s out there tonight. It\'s out there now. If I opened the window ...\n\nHe did not open the window.\n\n***\n\nHe had chills and fever in the morning.\n\n"You can\'t be sick," said Mildred.\n\nHe closed his eyes over the hotness. "Yes."\n\n"But you were all right last night."\n\n"No, I wasn\'t all right." He heard the "relatives" shouting in the parlor.\n\nMildred stood over his bed, curiously. He felt her there, he saw her without opening his eyes, her hair burnt by chemicals to a brittle straw, her eyes with a kind of cataract unseen but suspect far behind the pupils, the reddened pouting lips, the body as thin as a praying mantis from dieting, and her flesh like white bacon. He could remember her no other way.\n\n"Will you bring me aspirin and water?"\n\n"You\'ve got to get up," she said. "It\'s noon. You\'ve slept five hours later than usual."\n\n"Will you turn the parlor off?" he asked.\n\n"That\'s my family."\n\n"Will you turn it off for a sick man?"\n\n"I\'ll turn it down."\n\nShe went out of the room and did nothing to the parlor and came back. "Is that better?"\n\n"Thanks."\n\n"That\'s my favorite program," she said.\n\n"What about the aspirin?"\n\n"You\'ve never been sick before." She went away again.\n\n"Well, I\'m sick now. I\'m not going to work tonight. Call Beatty for me."\n\n"You acted funny last night." She returned, humming.\n\n"Where\'s the aspirin?" He glanced at the water glass she handed him.\n\n"Oh." She walked to the bath again. "Did something happen?"\n\n"A fire, is all."\n\n"I had a nice evening," she said, in the bathroom.\n\n"\'What doing?"\n\n"The parlor."\n\n"What was on?"\n\n"Programs."\n\n"What programs?"\n\n"Some of the best ever."\n\n"Who?"\n\n"Oh, you know, the bunch."\n\n"Yes, the bunch, the bunch, the bunch." He pressed at the pain in his eyes and suddenly the odor of kerosene made him vomit.\n\nMildred came in, humming. She was surprised. "Why\'d you do that?"\n\nHe looked with dismay at the floor. "We burnt an old woman with her books."\n\n"It\'s a good thing the rug\'s washable." She fetched a mop and worked on it. "I went to Helen\'s last night."\n\n"Couldn\'t you get the shows in your own parlor?"\n\n"Sure, but it\'s nice visiting."\n\nShe went out into the parlor. He heard her singing.\n\n"Mildred?" he called.\n\nShe returned, singing, snapping her fingers softly.\n\n"Aren\'t you going to ask me about last night?" he said.\n\n"What about it?"\n\n"We burnt a thousand books. We burnt a woman."\n\n"Well?"\n\nThe parlor was exploding with sound.\n\n"We burnt copies of Dante and Swift and Marcus Aurelius."\n\n"Wasn\'t he a European?"\n\n"Something like that."\n\n"Wasn\'t he a radical?"\n\n"I never read him."\n\n"He was a radical." Mildred fiddled with the telephone. "You don\'t expect me to call Captain Beatty, do you?"\n\n"You must!"\n\n"Don\'t shout!"\n\n"I wasn\'t shouting." He was up in bed, suddenly, enraged and flushed, shaking. The parlor roared in the hot air. "I can\'t call him. I can\'t tell him I\'m sick."\n\n"Why?"\n\nBecause you\'re afraid, he thought. A child feigning illness, afraid to call because after a moment\'s discussion, the conversation would run so: "Yes, Captain, I feel better already. I\'ll be in at ten o\'clock tonight."\n\n"You\'re not sick," said Mildred.\n\nMontag fell back in bed. He reached under his pillow. The hidden book was still there.\n\n"Mildred, how would it be if, well, maybe, I quit my job awhile?"\n\n"You want to give up everything? After all these years of working, because, one night, some woman and her books --"\n\n"You should have seen her, Millie!"\n\n"She\'s nothing to me; she shouldn\'t have had books. It was her responsibility, she should\'ve thought of that. I hate her. She\'s got you going and next thing you know we\'ll be out, no house, no job, nothing."\n\n"You weren\'t there, you didn\'t see," he said. "There must be something in books, things we can\'t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don\'t stay for nothing."\n\n"She was simple-minded."\n\n"She was as rational as you and I, more so perhaps, and we burnt her."\n\n"That\'s water under the bridge."\n\n"No, not water; fire. You ever seen a burnt house? It smolders for days. Well, this fire\'ll last me the rest of my life. God! I\'ve been trying to put it out, in my mind, all night. I\'m crazy with trying."\n\n"You should\'ve thought of that before becoming a fireman."\n\n"Thought!" he said. "Was I given a choice? My grandfather and father were firemen. In my sleep, I ran after them."\n\nThe parlor was playing a dance tune.\n\n"This is the day you go on the early shift," said Mildred. "You should\'ve gone two hours ago. I just noticed. "\n\n"It\'s not just the woman that died," said Montag. "Last night I thought about all the kerosene I\'ve used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I\'d never even thought that thought before." He got out of bed.\n\n"It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life, and then I come along in two minutes and boom! it\'s all over."\n\n"Let me alone," said Mildred. "I didn\'t do anything. "\n\n"Let you alone! That\'s all very well, but how can I leave myself alone? We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?"\n\nAnd then he shut up, for he remembered last week and the two white stones staring up at the ceiling and the pump-snake with the probing eye and the two soap-faced men with the cigarettes moving in their mouths when they talked. But that was another Mildred, that was a Mildred so deep inside this one, and so bothered, really bothered, that the two women had never met. He turned away.\n\nMildred said, "Well, now you\'ve done it. Out front of the house. Look who\'s here."\n\n"I don\'t care."\n\n"There\'s a phoenix car just drove up and a man in a black shirt with an orange snake stitched on his arm coming up the front walk."\n\n"Captain Beatty?" he said.\n\n"Captain Beatty."\n\nMontag did not move, but stood looking into the cold whiteness of the wall immediately before him.\n\n"Go let him in, will you? Tell him I\'m sick."\n\n"Tell him yourself!" She ran a few steps this way, a few steps that, and stopped, eyes wide, when the front door speaker called her name, softly, softly, Mrs. Montag. Mrs. Montag, someone here, someone here. Mrs. Montag, Mrs. Montag, someone\'s here. Fading. \n\nMontag made sure the book was well hidden behind the pillow, climbed slowly back into bed, arranged the covers over his knees and across his chest, half sitting, and after a while Mildred moved and went out of the room and Captain Beatty strolled in, his hands in his pockets.\n\n"Shut the \'relatives\' up," said Beatty, looking around at everything except Montag and his wife.\n\nThis time, Mildred ran. The yammering voices stopped yelling in the parlor.\n\nCaptain Beatty sat down in the most comfortable chair with a peaceful look on his ruddy face. He took time to prepare and light his brass pipe and puff out a great smoke cloud. "Just thought I\'d come by and see how the sick man is."\n\n"How\'d you guess?"\n\nBeatty smiled his smile which showed the candy pinkness of his gums and the tiny candy whiteness of his teeth. "I\'ve seen it all. You were going to call for a night off."\n\nMontag sat in bed.\n'
