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"That woman, the other night, Millie, you weren't there. You didn't see her face. And<br />
Clarisse. You never talked to her. I talked to her. And men like Beatty are afraid of<br />
her. I can't understand it. Why should they be so afraid of someone like her? But I<br />
kept putting her alongside the firemen in the house last night, and I suddenly realized<br />
I didn't like them at all, and I didn't like myself at all any more. And I thought maybe it<br />
would be best if the firemen themselves were burnt."<br />
"Guy! "<br />
The front door voice called softly:<br />
"Mrs. Montag, Mrs. Montag, someone here, someone here, Mrs. Montag, Mrs.<br />
Montag, someone here."<br />
Softly.<br />
They turned to stare at the door and the books toppled everywhere, everywhere in<br />
heaps.<br />
"Beatty!" said Mildred.<br />
"It can't be him."<br />
"He's come back!" she whispered.<br />
The front door voice called again softly. "Someone here . . ."<br />
"We won't answer." Montag lay back against the wall and then slowly sank to a<br />
crouching position and began to nudge the books, bewilderedly, with his thumb, his<br />
forefinger. He was shivering and he wanted above all to shove the books up through<br />
the ventilator again, but he knew he could not face Beatty again. He crouched and<br />
then he sat and the voice of the front door spoke again, more insistently. Montag<br />
picked a single small volume from the floor. "Where do we begin?" He opened the<br />
book half?way and peered at it. "We begin by beginning, I guess."<br />
"He'll come in," said Mildred, "and burn us and the books!"<br />
The front door voice faded at last. There was a silence. Montag felt the presence of<br />
someone beyond the door, waiting, listening. Then the footsteps going away down<br />
the walk and over the lawn.<br />
"Let's see what this is," said Montag.<br />
He spoke the words haltingly and with a terrible selfconsciousness. He read a dozen<br />
pages here and there and came at last to this:<br />
" `It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death<br />
rather than submit to break eggs at the smaller end."'<br />
Mildred sat across the hall from him. "What does it mean? It doesn't mean anything!<br />
The Captain was right! "<br />
"Here now," said Montag. "We'll start over again, at the beginning."<br />
PART II<br />
THE SIEVE AND THE SAND<br />
THEY read the long afternoon through, while the cold November rain fell from the sky<br />
upon the quiet house. They sat in the hall because the parlour was so empty and<br />
grey-looking without its walls lit with orange and yellow confetti and sky-rockets and<br />
women in gold-mesh dresses and men in black velvet pulling one-hundred-pound<br />
rabbits from silver hats. The parlour was dead and Mildred kept peering in at it with a<br />
blank expression as Montag paced the floor and came back and squatted down and<br />
read a page as many as ten times, aloud.<br />
" `We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel<br />
drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over, so in a series of<br />
kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.'"