 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! I heard my daughter's running feet in the animal rooms and her rollerskates banging at her side. Volplas at last. Yet I had always been so sure I could create them that I had been calling them volplas for ten years. No, twelve. 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. "Tell your mother that I retaliate. Again in the laboratory, I entered the metabolic accelerator and withdrew the intravenous needles from my first volplas. I carried their limp little forms out to a mattress in the lab, two girls and a boy. The accelerator had forced them almost to adulthood in less than a month. It would be several hours before they would begin to move, to learn to feed and play, perhaps to learn to fly. Meanwhile, it was clear that here was no war of dominant mutations. My wife tried the door, too, but more subtly, as if casually touching the knob while calling. I flipped a hamburger and a slice of onion onto a plate and picked up the ketchup and said, "I've reached the dangerous age." I kissed her until I heard rollerskates coming across the terrace from one direction and a horse galloping toward the terrace from the other direction. I've only had the feeling once before in a small way, but I've always...." Outside this little town, I found a litter of flat stones that had young black-snakes under each slab. Except for the face, chest and belly, they were covered with a soft, almost golden down. On their heads and across the shoulders of the male stood a shock of fur as soft as chinchilla. The cranium was in the same proportion to the body as it is in the human. The spars had been common to the basic colony for years and were the result of serial mutations effecting those greatly elongated fifth fingers that had first appeared in Nijinsky. No longer jointed like a finger, the spar turned backward sharply and ran alongside the wrist almost to the elbow. Powerful wrist muscles could snap it outward and forward. Suddenly, as I teased the male volpla, this happened.
 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.