 What is the nature of the narrator's relationship with his wife?
Volpla By WYMAN GUIN Illustrated by [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The only kind of gag worth pulling, I always maintained, was a cosmic one—till I learned the Cosmos has a really nasty sense of humor! There were three of them. Dozens of limp little mutants that would have sent an academic zoologist into hysterics lay there in the metabolic accelerator. I heard my daughter's running feet in the animal rooms and her rollerskates banging at her side. I closed the accelerator and walked across to the laboratory door. She twisted the knob violently, trying to hit a combination that would work. I unlocked the door, held it against her pushing and slipped out so that, for all her peering, she could see nothing. "Daddy, I've tried and tried and I just can't turn this old key tight enough." I continued to look down on her. "Well, Dad-dee, I can't!" "All right, wench. I strapped her ankle and pretended to use the key to tighten the clamp. Volplas at last. Three of them. Yet I had always been so sure I could create them that I had been calling them volplas for ten years. No, twelve. I glanced across the animal room to where old Nijinsky thrust his graying head from a cage. I had called them volplas since the day old Nijinsky's elongated arms and his cousin's lateral skin folds had given me the idea of a flying mutant. When Nijinsky saw me looking at him, he started a little tarantella about his cage. I smiled with nostalgia when the fifth fingers of his hands, four times as long as the others, uncurled as he spun about the cage. I turned to the fitting of my daughter's other skate. "Mother says you are eccentric. I lifted her out of the chair and stood her on her skates. "Tell your mother that I retaliate.
 They are an affectionate couple who respect each other.
 They have a happy marriage but the narrator is interested in the maid.  They have been together for a long time and the narrator is reaching a dangerous age.  They are an affectionate couple who respect each other.  They stayed together for their children and pretend to like each other.