I got up, stiff from sleeping in the chair,showered, changed my clothes, and went out to breakfast. Perhaps because the previous day had been, for me, so unusually eventful, or perhaps because I'd had relatively little sleep (I must say I take no great interest in causes), my mind was empty. All the way to the restaurant, all through the meal, all the way home, it was as though there were no Jacob Horner today. After I'd eaten I returned to my room, sat in my rocker, and rocked, barely sentient, for a long time, thinking of nothing.

Once I had a dream in which it became a matter of some importance to me to learn the weather prediction for the following day. I searched the newspapers for the weather report, but couldn't find it in its usual place. I turned the radio on, but the news broadcasters made no mention of tomorrow's weather. I dialed the Weather number on the telephone (this dream took place in Baltimore), but although the recording described the current weather conditions it told me nothing about the forecast for the next day. Finally, in desperation, I called the Weather Bureau directly, but it was late at night and no one answered. I happened to know the chief meteorologist's name, and so I called his house. The telephone rang many times before he answered, and then it seemed to me that I detected an uneasiness in his voice.

"What is it?" he asked.

"I want to know what weather we'll be having tomorrow," I demanded. "It's terribly important: you see, I --"

"There's no use your trying to impress me," the meteorologist said. "No use at all. What made you suspicious?"

"Suspicious of what? I assure you, sir, I just want to know what the weather will be tomorrow. I can't say I see anything suspicious in that question."

"There isn't going to be any weather tomorrow, if you must know."

"What?"

"You heard me. I said there isn't going to be any weather tomorrow. All our instruments agree. You mustn't be skeptical. No weather."

"But that's impossible!"

"I've said what I've said," the weatherman grumbled. "Take it or leave it. No weather tomorrow, and that's that. Leave me alone, now; I have to sleep."

That was the end of the dream, and I woke up very much upset. I tell it now to illustrate a difference between moods and the weather, their usual analogy: a day without weather is unthinkable, but for me at least there were frequently days without any mood at all. On these days Jacob Horner, except in a meaningless metabolistic sense, ceased to exist altogether, for I was without a character, without a personality: there was noego; noI . Like those microscopic specimens that biologists must dye in order to make them visible at all, I had to be colored with some mood or other if there was to be a recognizable self to me. The fact that my successive and discontinuous selves were linked to one another by the two unstable threads of body and memory; the fact that in the nature of Western languages the wordchange presupposes something upon which the changes operate; the fact that although the specimen is invisible without the dye, the dye is not the specimen --these are considerations of which I was aware, but in which I had no interest.

On my weatherless days I merely existed. My body sat in a rocking chair and rocked and rocked and rocked, and my mind was as nearly empty as interstellar space. Such was the day after the Morgans' visit: I sat and rocked from eight-thirty in the morning until perhaps two in the afternoon. If I looked at Laoco?n at all, it was without recognition. But at two o'clock the telephone rang and startled into being a Jacob Horner, who jumped from the chair and answered it.

"Hello?"

"Jacob? This is Rennie Morgan. Will you have dinner with us tonight?"

"Why,for God's sake?" This Jacob Horner was an irritable type.

"Why?" repeated Rennie uncertainly.

"Yes. Why the hell are you all so anxious to feed me a dinner?"

"Are you angry?"

"No, I'm not angry. I just want to know why you're all so anxious to feed me a dinner."

"Don't you want to come?"

"I didn't say that. Why are you all so anxious to feed me a dinner? That's all I asked."

There was a pause. Rennie was one who took all questions seriously; she would not offer an answer simply to terminate a situation, but must search herself for the truth. This, I take it, was Joe's doing. Another person would have asked pettishly, "Why does anybody ask anybody for dinner?" and thereby cloaked ignorance in the garb of self-evidence. After a minute she replied in a careful voice, as though examining her answer as she spoke.

"Well, I think it's because Joe's pretty much decided that he wants to get to know you well. He enjoyed the conversation last night."

"Didn't you?" I interrupted out of curiosity. I didn't really see how she could have, for we had talked of nothing but abstract ideas, and Rennie's determined but limited participation had been under what struck me as a tacit but very careful scrutiny from her husband. I don't mean to suggest that there was anything ungenuine in Rennie's interest, though it was awfullydeliberate, or anything of the husband embarrassed by his wife's opinions in Joe's concern about her statements; his attention was that of a tutor listening to his favorite protégé, and when he questioned her opinions he did so in an entirely impersonal, unarrogant, and unpedantic manner. Joe was not a pedant.

"Yes, I believe I did. Do you think that there ought to be a kind of waiting period between visits, Jacob?"

I was amazed. "What doyou think?"

Again a short pause, and then a solemn opinion.

"It seems to me that there wouldn't be any reason for it unless one of us just happened to feel like not seeing the other for a while. I think sometimes a person feels that way. Is that how you feel, Jake?"

"Well, now, let me see," I said soberly, and paused. "It seems to me that you do right to question the validity of social conventions, like waiting a certain time between visits, but you have to keep in mind that they're all ultimately unjustifiable. But it doesn't follow that because a thing is unjustifiable it's without value. And you have to remember thatdispensing with a convention, even a silly one, always involves the risk of being made to feel unreasonably guilty, simply because the conventions do happen to be conventions. Take drinking beer for breakfast, for instance, or going through red lights late at night, or committing adultery with your husband's approval, or performing a euthanasia ..."

"Are you making fun of me?" Rennie demanded mildly, as though asking purely for information.

"I am indeed!"

"You know, it seems to me that lots of times a person makes fun of another person because the other person's opinions make him uncomfortable but he doesn't really know how to refute them. He feels like heought to know how, but he doesn't, and instead of admitting that to himself and studying the problem and working out a real refutation, he just sneers at the other person's argument. It's too easy to sneer at an argument. I feel that way a lot about you, Jake."

"Yes. Joe said the same thing."

"Now youare making fun of me, aren't you?"

I was resolved not to let Mrs. Rennie Morgan make me uncomfortable again. That was too easy.

"Listen, I'll come eat your dinner tonight. I'll come at six o'clock, after you've put your kids to bed, like you said."

"We neither one want you to come if you don't feel like it, Jake. You have to be --"

"Now wait a minute.Why don't you want me to come even if I don't feel like it?"

"What?"

"I said why don't you want me to come even if I don't feel like it? You see, the only grounds you'd have for breaking the custom of waiting a proper interval between visits would be if you took the position that social conventions might be necessary for stability in a social group, but that they aren't absolutes and you can dispense with them in special situations where your end justifies it. In other words, you're willing to have me to dinner tonight anyhow as long as that's what we all want -- social stability isn't your end in this special situation. Well, then, suppose your end was to have another conversation and you had reason to believe that once I got there I'd talk to you whether I'd really wanted to come or not -- most guests would -- then it shouldn't matter to you whether I wanted to come or not, since your ends would be reached anyway."

"You're still making fun of me."

"Oh, now, that's too easy an out. It's beside the point whether I'm making fun of you or not. You're begging the question."

No answer.

"Now I'm coming to dinner at six o'clock, whether I want to or not, and if you aren't ready to answer my argument by then, I'm going to tell Joe."

"Six-thirty is when the kids go to bed," Rennie said in a slightly injured voice, and hung up. I went back to my rocker and rocked for another forty-five minutes. From time to time I smiled inscrutably, but I cannot say that this honestly reflected any sincere feeling on my part. It was just a thing I found myself doing, as frequently when walking alone I would find myself repeating over and over again in a judicious, unmetrical voice,Pepsi-Cola hits the spot; twelve full ounces: that's a lot - - accompanying the movement of my lips with a wrinkled brow, distracted twitches of the corner of my mouth, and an occasional quick gesture of my right hand. Passers-by often took me for a man lost in serious problems, and sometimes when I looked behind me after passing one, I'd see him, too, make a furtive movement with his right hand, trying it out.

At four-fifteen Dr. Schott telephoned and confirmed my appointment to the faculty of the Wicomico State Teachers College as a teacher of grammar and composition, at a starting salary of $3200 per year.

"You know," he said, "we don't pay what they pay at the big universities! Can't afford it! But that doesn't mean we're not choosy about our teachers! We're a pretty dedicated bunch, frankly, and we hired you because we believe you share our feelings about the importance of our job!"

I assured him that I did indeed share that feeling, and he assured me that he was sure I did, and we hung up. I was not pleased at being asked to teach composition as well as grammar-I was supposed to be strictly a prescriptive-grammar man -- but, pending advice from the Doctor, I thought it best to accept the job anyway.

As a matter of fact I drove out to the Morgans' place at five-thirty, for no particular reason. My day was no longer weatherless, but I was quiescent. I found Joe and Rennie having a leisurely catch with a football on the lawn in front of their house, although the afternoon was fairly warm. They showed no great surprise at seeing me, greeted me cordially, and invited me to join their game.

"No, thanks," I said, and went over to where their two sons, ages three and four, were throwing their own little football at each other -- adeptly for their age. I sat on the grass and watched everybody.

"I didn't mean to get upset on the phone today, Jake," Rennie said cheerfully between passes.

"Ah, don't pay attention to what I say on telephones," I said. "I can't talk right on telephones."

I've never seen a girl who could catch and throw a football properly except Rennie Morgan. As a rule she was a clumsy animal, but in any sort of strenuous physical activity she was completely at ease and even graceful. She caught the ball with her hands only -- so as not to injure her breasts, I suppose -- but she threw it in the same manner and with the same speed and accuracy as a practiced man.

"What have you changed your mind about that you said, then?" Joe asked, keeping his eyes on the ball.

"I don't even remember what I said."

"You don't? Gosh, Rennie remembers the whole conversation. Do you really not remember, or are you trying not to make her uncomfortable?"

"No, I really don't remember at all," I said, with some truth. "I've learned by now that you all don't believe in avoiding discomfort. The fact is I can never remember arguments, my own or anybody else's. I can remember conclusions, but not arguments."

This observation, which I thought arresting enough, seemed to disgust Joe. He lost interest in the conversation and stopped to correct the older boy's way of gripping the football. The kid attended his father's quiet advice as though it were coming from Knute Rockne himself; Joe watched him throw the ball correctly three times and turned away.

"Here, Jake," he said, tossing me the other ball. "Why don't you pitch a few with Rennie while I put supper on, and then we'll have a drink. No use to wait till six-thirty, since you're here."

I was, as I said before, quiescent. I would not voluntarily have joined the game, but neither would I go out of my way to avoid playing. Joe went on into the house, the two boys following close behind, and for the next twenty minutes Rennie and I threw the football to each other. Luckily -- for as a rule I dreaded being made to look ridiculous -- I was no novice at football myself; though not so adept a passer as Joe, I was able to throw at least as accurately and unwobblingly as Rennie. She seemed to have nothing special to say to me, nor did I to her, and so the only sound heard on the lawn was the rush of passing -- arms, the quiet spurts of running feet on the grass, the soft smack of catches, and our heavy breathing. It was all neither pleasant nor unpleasant.

Presently Joe called to us from the porch, and we went in to dinner. The Morgans rented half of the first floor of the house. Their apartment was very clean; what furniture they owned was the most severely plain modern, tough and functional, but there was very little of it. In fact, because the rooms were relatively large they seemed quite bare. There were no rugs on the hardwood floors, no curtains or drapes on the polished windows, and not a piece of furniture above the necessary minimum; a day bed, two sling chairs, two lamps, a bookcase, and a writing table in the living room; a small dining table and four metal folding chairs in the kitchen; and a double bunk, two bureaus, and a work table with benches in the single bedroom, where the boys slept. Because the walls and ceiling were white, the light pouring through the open Venetian blinds made the living room blindingly bright. I squinted; there was too much light in that room for me.

While we drank a glass of beer, the children went into the bedroom, undressed themselves, and actually bathed themselves without help in the water that Joe had already drawn for them. I expressed surprise at such independence at ages three and four: Rennie shrugged indifferently.

"We make pretty heavy demands on them for physical efficiency," Joe admitted. "What the hell, in New Guinea the kids are swimming before they walk, and paddling bamboo logs out in the ocean at Joey's age. We figured the less they're in our hair the better we'll get along with each other."

"Don't think we drive them," Rennie said. "We don't really give a damn. But I guess we demand a lot tacitly."

Joe listened to this remark with casual interest.

"Why do you say you don't give a damn?" he asked her.

Rennie was a little startled at the question, which she had not expected.

"Well -- I meanultimately. Ultimately it wouldn't matter one way or the other, would it? Butimmediately it matters because if they weren't independent we'd have to go through the same rigmarole most people go through, and the kids would be depending on all kinds of crutches."

"Nothing matters one way or the other ultimately," Joe pointed out. "The other importance is all there is to anything."

"That's what I meant, Joe."

"What I'm trying to say is that you shouldn't consider a value less real just because, it isn't absolute, since less-than-absolutes are all we've got. That's what's implied when you say you don'treally give a damn."

Well, it was Rennie's ball -- I watched them over my beer much as I'd watched them out on the lawn -- but the game was interrupted by the timer bell on the kitchen stove. Rennie went out to serve up the dinner while Joe dried the two boys and assisted them into their pajamas: their physical efficiency apparently didn't extend to fastening their own snaps in the back.

"Why don't you have them snap each other up in the back?" I suggested politely, observing this. Rennie flashed me an uncertain look from the kitchen, where she was awkwardly dishing out rice with a spoon too small for the job, but Joe laughed easily and immediately unsnapped both boys' pajama shirts so that they could try it. It worked.

Since there were only four chairs in the kitchen, Rennie and the two boys and I ate at the table while Joe ate standing up at the stove. There would have been no room at the table for one of the sling chairs, and anyhow it did not take long to eat the meal, which consisted of steamed shrimp, boiled rice, and beer for all hands. The boys -- husky, well-mannered youngsters -- were allowed to dominate the conversation during dinner; they were as lively and loud as any other bright kids their age, but a great deal more physically coordinated and self-controlled than most. As soon as we finished eating they went to bed, and though it was still quite light outside, I heard no more from them.

The Morgans had an arrangement with their first-floor neighbor whereby they could leave open a door connecting the two apartments and listen for each other's children if one couple wished to go out for the evening. Taking advantage of this, we went walking through a clover field and a small stand of pines behind the house after the supper dishes were washed. The Morgans tended to walk vigorously, and this did not fit well with my quiescent mood, but neither did refusing to accompany them. Rennie, apparently an amateur naturalist, remarked on various weeds, bugs, and birds as we bounded along, and Joe confirmed her identifications. I can't say I enjoyed the walk, although the Morgans enjoyed it almost fiercely. When it was over, Rennie went inside the house to write a letter, and Joe and I sat outside on the lawn in the two sling chairs. Our conversation, by his direction, dealt with values, since they'd come up earlier, and I went along for the ride:

"Most of what you told Rennie on the phone this afternoon was pretty sensible," Joe granted. "I'm glad you talked to her, and I'm glad you told her it was beside the point whether you were making fun of her or not. That's exactly what she needs to learn. She's too sensitive about that."

"So are you," I said. "Remember the Boy Scouts."

"No, I'm not, really," Joe denied, in a way that left you no special desire to insist that he was. "The only reason I caught it up about the Scouts was that I'd decided I wanted to know you a little bit, and it seemed to me that too much of that might stand in the way of any sensible talking. It doesn't matter at all outside of that."

"Okay." I offered him a cigarette, but he didn't smoke.

"What really pleases me is that in spite of your making fun of Rennie you seem willing to take her seriously. Almost no man is willing to take any woman's thinking seriously, and that's what Rennie needs more than anything else."

"It's none of my business, Joe," I said quiescently, "but if I were Rennie I'd object like hell having anybody so concerned over myneeds. You talk about her as if she were a patient of yours."

He laughed and jabbed his spectacles back on his nose. "I guess I do; I don't mean to. When Rennie and I were married we understood that neither of us wanted to make a permanent thing of it if we couldn't respect each other in every way. Certainly I'm not sold on marriage-under-any-circumstances, and I'm sure Rennie's not either. There's nothing intrinsically valuable about marriage."

"Seems to me you put a pretty high value onyour marriage," I suggested.

Joe squinted at me in disappointment, and I felt that had I been his wife he would have corrected me more severely than he did.

"Now you're making the same error Rennie made a while ago, before supper: the fallacy that because a value isn't intrinsic, objective, and absolute, it somehow isn'treal. What I said was that the marriage relationship isn't any more of an absolute than anything else. That doesn't mean that I don't value it; in fact I guess I value my relationship with Rennie more than anything else in the world. All it means is that once you admit it's no absolute, you have to decide for yourself the conditions under which marriage is important to you. Okay?"

"Suits me," I said indifferently.

"Well, do you agree or not?"

"Sure, I agree." And, so cornered, I suppose Idid agree, but there was something in me that would have recoiled from so systematic an analysis of things even if I'd had it straight from God that such happened to be the case.

"Well," Joe said, "I'm not a guy who needs to be married under any circumstances -- in fact, under a lot of circumstances I couldn't tolerate being married -- and one of my conditions for preserving any relationship at all, but particularly a marriage relationship, would be that the parties involved be able to take each other seriously. If I straighten Rennie out now and then, or tell her that some statement of hers is stupid as hell, or even slug her one, it's because I respect her, and to me that means not making a lot of kinds of allowances for her. Making allowances might be Christian, but to me it would always mean not taking seriously the person you make allowances for. That's the only objection I have to your making fun of Rennie: not that it might hurt her feelings, but that it means you're making allowances for her being awoman, or some such nonsense as that."

"Aren't you regarding this take-us-seriously business as an absolute?" I asked. "You seem to want you and Rennie to take each other seriously under any circumstances."

This observation pleased Joe, and to my chagrin I noticed that I was unaccountably happy that I'd said something he considered bright.

"That's a good point," he grinned, and began his harangue. "The usual criticism of people like me is that somewhere at the end of the line is theultimate end that gives the whole chain its relative value, and this ultimate end is rationally unjustifiable if there aren't any absolute values. These ends can be pretty impersonal, like 'the good of the state,' or else personal, like taking your wife seriously. In either case if you're going to defend these ends at all I think you have to call them subjective. But they'd never belogically defensible; they'd be in the nature of psychologicalgivens, different for most people. Four things that I'm not impressed by," he added, "are unity, harmony, eternality, and universality. In my ethics the most a man can ever do is be right from his point of view; there's no general reason why he should even bother to defend it, much less expect anybody else to accept it, but the only thing he can do is operate by it, because there's nothing else. He's got to expect conflict with people or institutions who are also right fromtheir points of view, but whose points of view are different from his.

"Suppose it were the essence of my nature that I was completely jealous of Rennie, for instance," he went on (I did not see how this could be possible, frankly; she didn't havethat much on the ball). "Now it happens that that's not the case at all, but suppose it were true that because of my psychological make-up, marital fidelity was one of thegivens, the subjective equivalent of an absolute, one of the conditions that would attach to any string of ethical propositions I might make for myself. Then suppose Rennie committed adultery behind my back. From my point of view the relationship would have lost itsraison d'être, and I'd probably walk out flat, if I didn't actually shoot her or shoot myself. But from the state's point of view, for example, I'd still be obligated to support her, because you can't have a society where people just walk out flat on family relationships like that. From their point of view I should be forced to pay support money, and I would have no reason to complain that their viewpoint isn't the same as mine: it couldn't be. In the same way, the state would be as justified in hanging me or jailing me for shooting her as I would be in shooting her -- do you see? Or the Catholic Church, if I were officially a Catholic, would be as justified from their point of view in refusing me sacred burial ground as I'd be in committing suicide if the marriage relationship had been one of thegivens for my whole life. I'd be a fool if I expected the world to excuse my actions simply because I can explain them clearly.

"That's one reason why I don't apologize for things," Joe said finally. "It's because I've no right to expect you or anybody to accept anything I do or say -- but I can alwaysexplain what I do or say. There's no sense in apologizing, because nothing is ultimately defensible. But a man can act coherently; he can act in ways that he can explain, if he wants to. This is important to me. Do you know, for the first month of our marriage Rennie used to apologize all over herself to friends who dropped in, because we didn't have much furniture in the house. She knew very well that we didn't want any more furniture even if we could have afforded it, but she always apologized to other people for not having their point of view. One day she did it more elaborately than usual, and as soon as the company left I popped her one on the jaw. Laid her out cold. When she came to, I explained to her very carefully why I'd hit her. She cried, and apologized to me for having apologized to other people. I popped her again."

There was no boastfulness in Joe's voice when he said this; neither was there any regret.

"What the hell, Jake, the more sophisticated your ethics get, the stronger you have to be to stay afloat. And when you say good-by to objective values, you really have to flex your muscles and keep your eyes open, because you're on our own. It takesenergy: not just personal energy, but cultural energy, or you're lost. Energy's what makes the difference between American pragmatism and French existentialism -- where the hell else but in America could you have a cheerful nihilism, for God's sake? I suppose it was rough, slugging Rennie, but I saw the moment as a kind of crisis. Anyhow, she stopped apologizing after that."

"Ah," I said.

Now it may well be that Joe made no such long coherent speech as this all at once; it is certainly true that during the course of the evening this was the main thing that got said, and I put it down here in the form of one uninterrupted whiz-bang for convenience's sake, both to illustrate the nature of his preoccupations and to add a stroke or two to my picture of the man himself. I heard it all quiescently; despite the fact that I was accustomed to expressing certain of these opinions myself at times (more hopefully than honestly), arguments against nearly everything he said occurred to me as he spoke. Yet I would by no means assert that he couldn't have refuted my objections -- I daresay even I could have. As was usually the case when I was confronted by a really intelligent and lucidly exposed position, I was as reluctant to give it more than notional assent as I was unable to offer a more reasonable position of my own. In such situations I most often adopted what in psychology is known as the "non-directive technique": I merely said, "Oh?" or "Ah," and gave the horse his head.

But I was interested in the story of Rennie's first encounter with the Morgan philosophy, and the irresistible rhetoric Joe had employed to open her eyes to the truth about apologies. It demonstrated clearly that philosophizing was no game to Mr. Morgan; that he lived his conclusions down to the fine print; and Rennie became a somewhat more interesting figure to me. Indeed, I should say that that particular little anecdote was doubtless the main thing that made me amenable to a proposal that Joe made later on, after Rennie had joined us out on the lawn.

"Do you like horseback-riding, Jake?" Rennie had happened to ask.

"Never rode before, Rennie."

"Gee, it's fun; you'll have to try it with me sometime."

I raised my eyebrows. "Yes, I suppose it would be better to do that before I tried it with a horse."

Rennie giggled, whipping her head from side to side, and Joe laughed loudly, but not, I think, enthusiastically. Then I saw his frowning forehead suddenly illuminate.

"Hey, that's an idea!" he exclaimed to Rennie. "Teach Jake how to ride!" He turned to me. "Rennie's folks have riding horses on then: farm, down the road, but I seldom get a chance to ride and Rennie hates to ride by herself. I'm busy nearly all day reading for my thesis before school starts. Why don't you let Rennie teach you to ride? It'll give her a chance to get outdoors more, and you all will be able to do some talking."

I was embarrassed both by Joe's deliberate enthusiasm for his project and by his poor taste in implying that talking to me would do Rennie good. It pleased me, perversely, to see Rennie squirm a little, too: she was apparently not yet so well educated by her husband that his ingenuousness did not sometimes embarrass her, even though she was careful to conceal her discomfort from Joe.

"What do you think?" he demanded of her.

"I think it's a swell idea, if Jake wants to learn," Rennie said quickly.

"Doyou?" Joe asked me.

I shrugged. "Doesn't make a damn to me."

"Well, if it doesn't make a damn to you, and Rennie and I think it's a good idea, then it's settled," Joe laughed. "In fact, whether you want to learn or not it's settled, if you're not willing to refuse, just like this dinner business!"

We all chuckled, and the subject was dropped, Joe explaining to me happily that as a matter of fact my statement on the telephone (that I would come to dinner whether I wanted to or not) was unintelligible.

"Rennie would've told you if you hadn't flustered her by making fun of her," he smiled; "the only demonstrable index to a man's desires is his acts, when you're speaking of past time: what a man did is what he wanted to do."

"What?"

"Don't you see?" asked Rennie, and Joe sat back and relaxed. "The idea is that you could have conflicting desires -- say, the desire not to have dinner with us and the desire not to offend us. If you end by coming to dinner it's because the second desire was stronger than the first: other things being equal, you wouldn't want to eat with us, but other things never are equal, and actually you'd rather eat with us than insult us. So you eat with us -- that's what youfinally wanted to do. You shouldn't say you'll eat with us whether you want to or not; you should say you'll eat with us if it satisfies desires in you stronger than your desirenot to eat with us."

"It's like combining plus one hundred and minus ninety-nine," Joe said. "The answer is just barely plus, but it's completely plus. That's another reason why it's silly for anybody to apologize for something he's done by claiming he didn't really want to do it: what hewanted to do, in the end, was what he did. That's important to remember when you're reading history."

I observed that Rennie colored slightly at the reference to apologizing.

"Mmm," I replied to Joe, non-directively.