"I would be a genius now," Quilty has said three times already, "if only I'd memorized Shakespeare instead of Lulu." "If only," says Mack. Mack himself would be a genius now if only he had been born a completely different person. But what could you do? He'd read in a magazine once that geniuses were born only to women over thirty; his own mother had been twenty-nine. Damn! So fucking close!"