They are one’s organs steaming up. Gertrude Stein has it in her lecture notes. Emotions are how one, finding one’s physiology all steamed up, conceives of the disturbance. So taught her professor Doctor William James.
        She wishes she could explain it to the poor bear. The poor, dear bear with the coat of a Romanov and such beautiful brown eyes and such beautiful brown mucus blinking in them.
        The bear, naturally, is Guest of Honor, and the other guests, naturally, are running screaming. It is all most natural.
        “Darling, it isn’t that they fear you so much they scream. It’s their little bodies scream so much that they begin to suspect they fear you. You see the difference?
        “And a scream—that’s a beautiful thing to give someone.
        “These prune dainties, you know they haven’t had a scream in years.”
        The bear blinks brownly.
        “You put that in them. So much organ steam that have to scream to vent it out. They ought to send you thank-you cards.”
        Out now flies the last fleer. Alice, with her lacy cuffs, waves goodbye.
        She, Alice B. Toklas, found the bear plundering fish stands at the Marché des Enfants-Rouges. “Why is it,” Alice said, “that when a bear plunders the fish stands of a picture book she’s a heroine, but when she plunders one’s own fish stall she’s a bear? I told her come at dix-sept heures.”
        Gertrude and Alice ponder the distinction all evening. The disturbance that spreads all through one’s own Marché when a Romanov she-bear begins guzzling up one’s own shiny fish. How it sets one’s own street cooks sprinting, spilling one’s own stacked dumpling steamers. All that tumbled cabbage! And bouncing down one’s own market rows come red bean buns fuming steam!
          The Guest of Honor sits between her hosts, the dinner guests all fled. Hélène has set out a crystal bowl of strawberry jam, and the bear has her snout all the way to the glass, breathing quick flapping butterflies of steam against it.
        It interests the scientist in Gertrude that all three of them, and you as well, have bodies full of steam. Not long ago, drafty old men dreamt of running pipes so all the world could be connected via steam. Then—then they could blow their whistles anywhere! That was the old boys’ dream. Needless to say, it didn’t work. The trouble wasn’t the pipefitting. It was keeping the fire up, the pressure pushing, the steam thick.
        The bear’s two arms tilt the table toward her. Gertrude strokes the one and Alice the other. What deep arms. Deep to keep the heat in, and yet the heat or something containing it comes to join them through the handsome tubules of their palms. She looks at Alice over the bear’s hunch. Alice looks back. Love is the word she knows for what is passing through this bear. It is yours and ours and ours.