“Good,” Dragon said with satisfaction. “Now we’ll try it the other way.”“Other? But this is perfectly fine.”“You can’t get anywhere lying on your back.” His smile turned devilish. “Well, actually you can but perhaps this isn’t the time to dwell on that.”

“Do whatever comes your way to do as well as you can. Think as little as possible about yourself. Think as much as possible about other people. Dwell on things that are interesting. Since you get more joy out of giving joy to others, you should put a good deal of thought into the happiness that you are able to give.”

“Well,’ I said, ‘Paris is old, is many centuries. You feel, in Paris, all the time gone by. That isn’t what you feel in New York — ’He was smiling. I stopped.‘What do you feel in New York?’ he asked.‘Perhaps you feel,’ I told him, ‘all the time to come. There’s such power there, everything is in such movement. You can’t help wondering—I can’t help wondering—what it will all be like—many years from now.”

“But the real way to get happiness is by giving out happiness to other people. Try and leave this world a little better than you found it and when your turn comes to die, you can die happy in feeling that at any rate you have not wasted your time but have done your best.”

“You see, you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”

“Is your future faery bride too ugly for you?”Rhys leaned back against the head rest and studied the seatback in front of him. “That’s not it.”“Too old or too young?”“No.”I rolled my eyes, but smiled. This was why he was upset. Hehadn’t landed the perfect bride-to-be. “Her pretty faery wingsaren’t the right shade of sparkly lavender and pink?”His eyes flashed with anger. “Actually, she doesn’t have faerywings.”“She doesn’t?”“No. As a matter of fact, the dragon oracle tells me the girl I’msupposed to marry, the one destined to someday become the queenof the faery realm, isn’t a faery at all.”Okay, that was surprising. Not a faery?“She isn’t?” I said. “Then who is she?”His expression was severe as he turned to look me right in theeye.“You,” he said”