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smoothly.'
      'Well,' ventured Eleanor cautiously, 'Africans do have a right to telephones, electricity and running water—don't they?'
      Calvin withered her with a look of excruciating weariness.
      'Then, you should be happy,' Eleanor backed off, relieved the waiter was no longer listening. 'Most Africans have no such amenities, do they? Of which I'm painfully, and constantly, aware. In shops, I put a chocolate bar on the counter, next to a woman with two kilos of posho and a little fermented milk with which she has to feed the whole family for a week—I put the candy back. Everywhere I go on this continent I feel ashamed. I'm tired of it, Calvin. I am dying, dying of shame.'
      'They like posho . Africans do not identify with your life at all. They see white people the way you look at oryx.'
      'Hogwash. They want cars and I have one. Try and tell me they don't resent that.'
      'Give your flipping car away, then.'
      'That won't change anything.'
      'That's the first intelligent thing you've said. And at least—' he pointed to her hartebeest—'you now eat your dinner.'

    In 1972 they had both attended a Population and Environment conference in Nairobi, when the KICC was brand-new and conferences had seemed better than junkets; at least to Eleanor, who was only twenty-one, an intern with the United Nations Fund for Population Activities and fresh from the Peace Corps.
    Calvin had just joined USAID himself, and asked her to dine at the Hilton. His fourteen-year seniority had daunted her then, and maybe that's why she'd felt compelled to make a fool of herself: because he was so much older and more important and she had no idea why he would go out with her. She was only aware in later years, once her looks had begun to slip, that she had once been rather pretty.
      Half-way through dinner at the luxury hotel, she had been overcome by nausea. Calvin had done most of the talking; she was sure he would pick up the bill and could not see how her company had earned so much as a hard roll. She was gripped by anxiety that she had no personality at all, and concluded that if she had failed to concoct it by twenty-one it was time to make one up.
      'I can't eat this,' she announced, fists on the cloth. 'I'm sorry. The idea of our sitting here paying hundreds of shillings for shellfish while people right outside the door starve—it makes me sick.'
      Calvin nimbly kept eating. 'If you truly have ambitions to work in the Third World, young lady, you'll have to develop a less delicate stomach.'
      'How can you!' she exclaimed, exasperated as he started on another prawn. 'After we've spent all day forecasting worldwide famine by the year 2000!'
      'That's just the kind of talk that whets my appetite.'
      'Well, it kills mine.'
      'If you feel so strongly about it,' he suggested, 'go feed them your dinner.'
      Eleanor had picked up her plate and left the restaurant. One of the waiters came running after her, since she'd marched off with their china. Eleanor looked left and right and had to walk a couple of blocks to find a beggar, and was promptly confronted with the logistical problem of delivering her food aid and returning the plate. So she stood dumbly by the cripple with elephantiasis, whose eyes were either uncomprehending or insulted. He rattled his tin, where she could hardly muck shrimp, now could she? It struck her, as saffron sauce dripped from the gilt-edged porcelain, that just because you could not walk did not mean you had no standards of behaviour, which parading about Nairobi with a half-eaten
    hotel entrée after dark clearly did not meet. She groped in her jeans for the coins she knew were not there; her notes were back in her purse. Shrugging, she turned under the stern, disparaging gaze of the dispossessed and shuffled back to the Hilton, where the waiter stood outside with hands on hips. Eleanor ducked around the corner and scraped the rest of her dinner into the gutter.
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