"Awfully sorry I'm late. Are you freezing?"

Therese Stepped out into the street and looked, but the streets were empty with a Sunday morning emptiness. The wind flung itself around the tall cement corner of Frankenberg's as if it were furious at finding no human figure there to oppose. No one but her, Therese thought, and grinned suddenly at herself. She might have thought of a more pleasant place to meet than this. The wind was like ice against her teeth. Carol was a quarter of an hour late. If she didn't come, she would probably keep on waiting, all day and into the night. One figure came out of the subway's pit, a splintery thin hurrying figure of a woman in a long black coat under which her feet moved as fast as if four feet were rotating on a wheel.

"Hello. I thought you weren't coming."

Then Therese turned around and saw Carol in a car drawn up by the curb across the street. Therese walked toward her.

"Hi!" Carol called, and leaned over to open the door for her.

"No." Therese got in and pulled the door shut. The car was warm inside, a long dark-green car with dark- green leather upholstery. Carol drove slowly west.

They roared into the Lincoln Tunnel. A wild, inexplicable excitement mounted in Therese as she stared through the windshield. She wished the tunnel might cave in and kill them both, that their bodies might be dragged out together. She felt Carol glancing at her from time to time.

"Shall we go out to the house? Where would you like to go?"

They drove uptown. It was like riding inside a rolling mountain that could sweep anything before it, yet was absolutely obedient to Carol.

"It doesn't matter," Therese said. She could see freckles along the bridge of Carol's nose. Her short fair hair that made Therese think of perfume held to a light was tied back with the green and gold scarf that circled her head like a band.

"Do you like driving?" Carol asked without looking at her. She had a cigarette in her mouth. She drove with her hands resting lightly on the wheel, as if it were nothing to her, as if she sat relaxed in a chair somewhere, smoking. "Why're you so quiet?"

"Let's go out to the house. It's pretty out there."

"No, I haven't," Therese answered. She supposed she was pale. She had started to have breakfast, but she had dropped the milk bottle in the sink, and then given it all up.

"Better have some coffee. It's there in the thermos."

They were out of the tunnel. Carol stopped by the side of the road.

Then Carol took the thermos herself and poured some into the cup, steaming and light brown.

Therese looked at the coffee gratefully. "Where'd it come from?"

"Have you had breakfast?"

Carol smiled. "Do you always want to know where things come from?"

The coffee was very strong and a little sweet. It sent strength through her. When the cup was half empty, Carol started the car. Therese was silent. What was there to talk about? The gold four-leaf clover with Carol's name and address on it that dangled from key chain on the dashboard? The stand of Christmas trees they passed on the road? The bird that flew by itself across a swampy looking field? No. Only the things she had written to Carol in the unmailed letter were to be talked about, and that was impossible.

"There," Carol said, nodding at the thermos between them on the seat.

They had just driven into a little town and out of it. Now on the driveway that made a great semicircular curve, they approached a white two-story house that had projecting side wings like the paws of a resting lion.

Behind her, the door closed with a light, firm double report. Therese turned and found Carol looking at her puzzledly, her lips parted a little as if in surprise, and Therese felt that in the next second Carol would ask, "What are you doing here?" as if she had forgotten, or had not meant to bring her here at all.

"There's no one here but the maid. And she's far away," Carol said, as if in reply to some question of Therese's.

"Do you like the country?" Carol asked as they turned into a smaller road.

There was a metal door mat, a big shining brass mailbox, a dog barking hollowly from around the side of the house, where a white garage showed beyond some trees. The house smelled of some spice, Therese thought, mingled with a separate sweetness that was not Carol's perfume either.

"It's a lovely house," Therese said, and saw Carol's little smile that was tinged with impatience.

"Take off your coat." Carol took the scarf from around her head and ran her fingers through her hair. "Wouldn't you like a little breakfast? It's almost noon."

Carol looked around the living room, and the same puzzled dissatisfaction came back to her face. "Let's go upstairs. It's more comfortable."

Therese followed Carol up the white wooden staircase, past an oil painting of a small girl with yellow hair and a square chin like Carol's, past a window where a garden with an S-shaped path, a fountain with a blue-green statue appeared for an instant and vanished. Upstairs, there was a short hall with four or five rooms around it. Carol went into a room with green carpet and walls, and took a cigarette from a box on a table. She glanced at Therese as she lighted it. Therese didn't know what to do or say, and she felt Carol expected her to do or say something, anything. Therese studied the simple room with its dark-green carpet and the long green pillowed bench along one wall. There was a plain table of pale wood in the center. A game room, Therese thought, though it looked more like a study with its books and music albums and its lack of pictures.

"No, thanks."

"You have a little girl, haven't you?" Therese asked.

Therese looked into the room opposite. It had flowered cotton upholstery and plain blond woodwork like the table in the other room. There was a long plain mirror over the dressing table, and throughout a look of sunlight, though no sunlight was in the room.

"My favorite room," Carol said, walking out of it. "But that's my room over there."

The bed was a double bed. And there were military brushes on the dark bureau across the room.

Carol opened a wall panel in the hall. "Yes," she said. "Would you like a coke?"

The hum of the refrigerator came louder now. Through all the house, there was no sound but those they made. Therese did not want the cold drink, but she took the bottle and carried it downstairs after Carol, through the kitchen and into the back garden she had seen from the window. Beyond the fountain were a lot of plants some three feet high and wrapped in burlap bags that looked like something, standing there in a group, Therese thought, but she didn't know what. Carol tightened a string that the wind had loosened. Stooped in the heavy wool skirt and the blue cardigan sweater, her figure looked solid and strong, like her face, but not like her slender ankles. Carol seemed oblivious of her for several minutes, walking about slowly, planting her moccasined feet firmly, as if in the cold flowerless garden she was at last comfortable. It was bitterly cold without a coat, but because Carol seemed oblivious of that, too, Therese tried to imitate her.

Therese glanced in vain for a picture of him. There was a picture of Carol on the dressing table, holding up a small girl with blond hair. And a picture of a woman with dark curly hair, smiling broadly, in a silver frame.

She was preoccupied with something, and regretted after all inviting her out to the house, Therese felt. They walked back to the door at the end of the garden path.

"And how do you like your job?" Carol asked in the kitchen, still with her air of remoteness. She was looking into the big refrigerator. She lifted out two plates covered with wax paper. "I wouldn't mind some lunch, would you?"

"What would you like to do?" Carol asked. "Take a walk? Play some records?"

She wanted to say, and how to love. She had never loved anyone before Carol, not even Sister Alicia.

"I'm very content," Therese told her.

Therese had intended to tell her about the job at the Black Cat Theatre.

Now she replied slowly, trying to sound as detached as Carol, though she heard her shyness predominating, "I suppose it's educational. I learn how to be a thief, a liar, and a poet all at once." Therese leaned back in the straight chair so her head would be in the warm square of sunlight.

That would count for something, she thought, that would be the single important thing she could tell about herself. But this was not the time.

"By feeling things -- too much, I suppose," Therese answered conscientiously.

Carol looked at her. "How do you become a poet?"

"And how do you become a thief?" Carol licked something off her thumb and frowned. "You don't want any caramel pudding, do you?"

"No, thank you. I haven't stolen yet, but I'm sure it's easy there. There are pocketbooks all around, and one just takes something. They steal the meat you buy for dinner." Therese laughed. One could laugh at it with Carol. One could laugh at anything with Carol.

They had sliced cold chicken, cranberry sauce, green olives, and crisp white celery. But Carol left her lunch and went into the living room. She came back carrying a glass with some whisky in it, and added some water to it from the tap. Therese watched her. Then for a long moment, they looked at each other, Carol standing in the doorway and Therese at the table, looking over her shoulder, not eating.

Carol asked quietly, "Do you meet a lot of people across the counter this way? Don't you have to be careful whom you start talking to?"

"Oh, yes," Therese smiled.

"Not many? Just three or four?"

"Some."

"Or whom you go out to lunch with?" Carol's eyes sparkled. "You might run into a kidnaper." She rolled the drink around in the iceless glass, then drank it off, the thin silver bracelets on her wrist rattling against the glass. "Well -- do you meet many people this way?"

"Like you?" Therese met her eyes steadily.

And Carol looked fixedly at her, as if she demanded another word, another phrase from Therese. But then she set the glass down on the stove top and turned away. "Do you play the piano?"

"No," Therese said.

"Come and play something." And when Therese started to refuse, she said imperatively, "Oh, I don't care how you play. Just play something."

Therese played some Scarlatti she had learned at the Home. In a chair on the other side of the room. Carol sat listening relaxed and motionless, not even sipping the new glass of whisky and water. Therese played the C major Sonata, which was slowish and rather simple, full of broken octaves, but it struck her as dull, then pretentious in the trill parts, and she stopped. It was suddenly too much, her hands on the keyboard that she knew Carol played, Carol watching her with her eyes half closed, Carol's, whole house around her, and the music that made her abandon herself, made her-defenseless. With a gasp, she dropped her hands in her lap.

She went with Carol upstairs again. Therese pulled herself up by the banister and was reminded suddenly of Mrs. Robichek.

Therese could see her hands in her memory -- flexible and strong, the delicate tendons showing as they pressed her shoulders. It seemed an age as her hands moved toward her neck and under her chin, an age of tumult so intense it blotted out the pleasure of Carol's tipping her head back and kissing her lightly at the edge of her hair. Therese did not feel the kiss at all.

"Are you tired?" Carol asked calmly.

The question seemed not of now but of always. "Yes."

Carol came up behind her and set her hands on Therese's shoulders.

"Thanks, I'm not really --"

"I think a nap wouldn't hurt you," Carol said, turning down the flowered cotton bedspread and the top blanket.

"Come with me," Carol said.

Therese looked at the bed. She had hardly slept the night before. "I don't think I shall sleep, but if I do --"

"Slip your shoes off," Carol said softly, but in a tone that commanded obedience.

Therese felt that she thought of something so intensely, one might have touched the thought in the air between them. Then Carol slipped her hands under her shoulders, and bent her head down to Therese's throat, and Therese felt the tension go out of Carol's body with the sigh that made her neck warm, that carried the perfume that was in Carol's hair.

Therese looked up at her, unable to bear her eyes now but bearing them nevertheless, not caring if she died that instant, if Carol strangled her, prostrate and vulnerable in her bed, the intruder. "Nineteen." How old it sounded. Older than ninety-one.

Carol's eyebrows frowned, though she smiled a little.

Therese remembered what she had thought of in the restaurant, and she set her teeth in shame.

"I'll wake you in half an hour." Carol pulled the blanket over her when she lay down. Carol sat down on the edge of the bed. "How old are you, Therese?"

"What would you like?" Carol repeated.

"You're a child," Carol said, like a reproach. She lifted her head. "What would you like?"

Carol got up and went to her dressing table and lighted a cigarette.

"Nothing, thanks."

"What would you like, a drink?"

"I let it boil and it's got a scum on it," Carol said annoyedly. "I'm sorry."

Therese watched her through half-closed lids, worried by Carol's restlessness, though she loved the cigarette, loved to see her smoke.

Therese knew she meant water. She knew from the tenderness and the concern in her voice, as if she were a child sick with fever. Then Therese said it: "I think I'd like some hot milk."

The corner of Carol's mouth lifted in a smile. "Some hot milk," she mocked. Then she left the room.

And Therese lay in a limbo of anxiety and sleepiness all the long while until Carol reappeared with the milk in a straight-sided white cup with a saucer under it, holding the saucer and the cup handle, and closing the door with her foot.

"Is that the way you like it? Plain like that?"

But Therese loved it, because she knew this was exactly what Carol would always do, be thinking of something else and let the milk boil.

"Ug," Carol said, and sat down on the arm of a chair and watched her.

Therese nodded.

Therese was propped on one elbow. The milk was so hot, she could barely let her lip touch it at first. The tiny sips spread inside her mouth and released a melange of organic flavors. The milk seemed to taste of bone and blood, of warm flesh, or hair, saltless as chalk yet alive as a growing embryo.

It was hot through and through to the bottom of the cup, and Therese drank it down, as people in fairy tales drink the potion that will transform, or the unsuspecting warrior the cup that will kill. Then Carol came and took the cup, and Therese was drowsily aware that Carol asked her three questions, one that had to do with happiness, one about the store, and one about the future. Therese heard herself answering. She heard her voice rise suddenly in a babble, like a spring that she had no control over, and she-realized she was in tears. She was telling Carol all that she feared and disliked, of her loneliness, of Richard, and of gigantic disappointments. And of her parents. Her mother was not dead. But Therese had not seen her since she was fourteen.

She had been a pianist -- no, not a first-rate one, how could she be, but she had always found work because she was pushing. And when Therese was about ten, her mother had remarried. Therese had visited at her mother's house in Long Island in the Christmas holidays, and they had asked her to stay with them, but not as if they wanted her to stay. And Therese had not liked the husband, Nick, because he was exactly like her mother, big and dark haired, with a loud voice, and violent and passionate gestures.

Carol, questioned her, and she answered, though she did not want to talk about her mother. Her mother was not that important, not even one of the disappointments. Her father was. Her father was quite different. He had died when she was six -- a lawyer of Czechoslovakian descent who all his life had wanted to be a painter. He had been quite different, gentle, sympathetic, never raising his voice in anger against the woman who had nagged at him, because he had been neither a good lawyer nor a good painter. He had never been strong, he had died of pneumonia, but in Therese's mind, her mother had killed him. Carol questioned and questioned her, and Therese told of her mother's bringing her to the school in Montclair when she was eight, of her mother's infrequent visits afterward, for her mother had traveled a great deal around the country.

Therese was sure their marriage would be perfect. Her mother had been pregnant even then, and now there were two children. After a week with them, Therese had returned to the Home. There had been perhaps three or four visits from her mother afterward, always with some present for her, a blouse, a book, once a cosmetic kit that Therese had loathed simply because it reminded her of her mother's brittle, mascaraed eye-lashes, presents handed her self-consciously by her mother, like hypocritical peace offerings. Once her mother had brought the little boy, her half brother, and then Therese had known she was an outsider. Her mother had not loved her father, had chosen to leave her at a school when she was eight, and why did she bother now even to visit her, to claim her at all?

Therese would have been happier to have no parents, like half the girls in the school. Finally, Therese had told her mother she did not want her to visit again, and her mother hadn't, and the ashamed, resentful expression, the nervous sidewise glance of the brown eyes, the twitch of a smile and the silence -- that was the last she remembered of her mother.

Therese hadn't wanted any money from her, had half believed her mother wouldn't give her any, but she had, and Therese had taken it.

Then she had become fifteen. The sisters at the school had known her mother was not writing. They had asked her to write, and she had, but Therese had not answered. Then when graduation came, when she was seventeen, the school had asked her mother for two hundred dollars.

"Nonsense," Carol said softly. She was sitting on the arm of the chair, resting her chin in her hand, her eyes fixed on Therese, smiling. "You were still a child. When you forget about paying her back, then you'll be an adult."

"I'm sorry I took it. I never told anyone but you. Some day I want to give it back."

Therese did not answer.

"Does Richard know all this?"

"Don't you think you'll ever want to see her again? Maybe in a few years from now?"

"No. Just that she's alive. Does it matter? This isn't what matters."

Therese shook her head. She smiled, but the tears still oozed out of her eyes. "I don't want to talk any more about it."

"Yes, you will." And a match scraped.

"I'll never cry again," she said.

She felt if she wept enough, it would all go out of her, the tiredness and the loneliness and the disappointment, as though it were in the tears themselves. And she was glad Carol left her alone to do it now. Carol was standing by the dressing table, her back to her. Therese lay rigid in the bed, propped up on her elbow, racked with the half-suppressed sobs.

She had fled them all. There had been Lily, and Mr. and Mrs. Anderson in the house where she had first lived in New York. Frances Cotter and Tim at the Pelican Press. Lois Vavrica, a girl who had been at the Home in Montclair, too. Now who was there? The Kellys who lived on the second floor at Mrs. Osborne's. And Richard. "When I was fired from that job last month," Therese said, "I was ashamed and I moved --" She stopped.

"Who else is in your life besides Richard?" Carol asked.

Therese took another cleansing tissue from the bed table and blew her nose.

"I didn't tell anyone where, except Richard. I just disappeared. I suppose it was my idea of starting a new life, but mostly I was ashamed. I didn't want anyone to know where I was."

"Moved where?"

"No," Carol answered herself.

Carol smiled. "Disappeared! I like that. And how lucky you are to be able to do it. You're free. Do you realize that?"

Beside Carol on the dressing table, a square gray clock ticked faintly, and as Therese had done a thousand times in the store, she read the time and attached a meaning to it. It was four fifteen and a little more, and suddenly she was anxious lest she had lain there too long, lest Carol might be expecting someone to come to the house.

Therese said nothing.

Then the telephone rang, sudden and long like the shriek of a hysterical woman in the hall, and they saw each other start.

Carol stood up, and slapped something twice in her palm, as she had slapped the gloves in her palm in the store. The telephone screamed again, and Therese was sure Carol was going to throw whatever it was she held in her hand, throw it across the room against the wall. But Carol only turned and laid the thing down quietly, and left the room.

Therese could hear Carol's voice in the hall. She did not want to hear what she was saying. She got up and put her skirt and her shoes on. Now she saw what Carol had held in her hand. It was a shoehorn of tan-colored wood. Anyone else would have thrown it, Therese thought. Then she knew one word for what she felt about Carol: pride. She heard Carol's voice repeating the same tones, and now opening the door to leave, she heard the words, "I have a guest," for the third time calmly presented as a barrier. "I think it's an excellent reason. What better?… What's the matter with tomorrow? If you --"

"Shouldn't I leave?" Therese asked.

Then the doorbell chimed downstairs, and the latch clicked at the same time.

"Harge, this is Miss Belivet," Carol said. "Mr. Aird."

"Who is it that's coming?"

Then there was no sound until Carol's first step on the stair, and Therese knew whoever had been talking to her had hung up on her. Who dared, Therese wondered.

She knew Carol did not want to take another drive. Therese started to straighten the bed.

"Leave the bed." Carol was watching her from the hall. "Just close the door."

Therese felt sick with dread suddenly, not of the man but of Carol's annoyance at his coming.

Carol looked at her in the same way she had when they first entered the house. "Not unless you want to. No. We'll take a drive later, if you want to."

He was coming up the stairs. When he saw Therese, he slowed, and a faint surprise crossed his face, and then he looked at Carol.

"No end prompt today," Carol murmured. "Come down, Therese."

Carol turned and went into the green room. "My husband," she said. "Hargess."

Then to Carol, "I'm sorry to disturb you. I only wanted to get one or two things." He went past her and opened the door to a room Therese had not seen. "Things for Rindy," he added.

"Play some more, if you like," Carol said.

Carol and Therese went downstairs. In the living room Carol sat down, but Therese did not.

"Pictures on the wall?" Carol asked.

"Play some," Carol said firmly.

And Carol subsided. Carol even smiled.

Therese shook her head.

Harge only glanced at Therese, but his nervous blue eyes inspected her from head to toe. He was a heavily built man with a rather pink face. One eyebrow was set higher than the other, rising in an alert peak in the center, as if it might have been distorted by a scar. "How do you do?"

"How do you do?" Therese said.

The man was silent.

Therese was frightened by the sudden white anger in her eyes. "I can't," Therese said, stubborn as a mule.

They heard Harge's quick steps cross the hall and stop, then descend the stairs slowly. Therese saw his dark clad figure and then his pinkish blond head appear.

"I can't find that watercolor set. I thought it was in my room," he said complainingly.

"I know where it is." Carol got up and started toward the stairs.

"I suppose you want me to take her something for Christmas," Harge said.

They are just divorced, Therese thought, or about to be divorced.

Harge looked at Therese, almost offered her his cigarette case, and didn't. He had an intense expression that curiously mingled anxiety and boredom. The flesh around his mouth was firm and heavy, rounding into the line of his mouth so that he seemed lipless. He lighted a cigarette for himself. "Are you from New York?" he asked.

"Thanks, I'll give the things to her." Carol went up the stairs.

Therese felt the disdain and incivility in the question, like the sting of a slap in the face. "Yes, from New York," she answered.

He was on the brink of another question to her, when Carol came down the stairs. Therese had steeled herself to be alone with him for minutes. Now she shuddered as she relaxed, and she knew that he saw it.

"Are you going to take the presents to Rindy? When?"

"Thanks," Harge said as he took the box from Carol. He walked to his overcoat that Therese had noticed on the loveseat, sprawled open with its black arms spread as if it were fighting and would take possession of the house. "Good-by," Harge said to her. He put the overcoat on as he walked to the door. "Friend of Abby's?" he murmured to Carol.

"A friend of mine," Carol answered.

"Carol --" He stopped on the porch, and Therese barely heard him say something about making things unpleasant. Then, "I'm going to see Cynthia now. Can I stop by on the way back? It'll be before eight."

"What if I gave her nothing, Harge?"

"Because it concerns Rindy." Then his voice faded unintelligibly.

"Harge, what's the purpose?" Carol said wearily. "Especially when you're so disagreeable."

Then an instant later, Carol came in alone and closed the door. Carol stood against the door with her hands behind her, and they heard the car outside leaving. Carol must have agreed to see him tonight, Therese thought.

"It doesn't matter."

"I'll go," Therese said. Carol said nothing. There was a deadness in the silence between them now, and Therese grew more uneasy. "I'd better go, hadn't I?"

Carol's forehead wrinkled and she said with difficulty, "Do you mind if I put you on the train tonight, instead of driving you home?"

"No." She couldn't have borne Carol's driving her home and driving back alone tonight in the darkness.

Of course, of course, she would see her again, Therese thought. An idiotic question!

Carol only smiled at her, a little reproachfully, as the window between them rose up. "Au revoir," she said.

Therese blurted suddenly, "Will I see you again?"

Therese longed for the store again, longed for Monday, because Carol might come in again on Monday. But it wasn't likely. Tuesday was Christmas Eve. Certainly she could telephone Carol by Tuesday, if only to wish her a merry Christmas.

"Yes, I'm sorry. I'm sorry about Harge. He's not always-so rude. It was a mistake to say I had any guest here at all."

"There's a train in about four minutes," Carol said.

The car backed fast and turned away into the darkness.

They were silent also in the car. Therese opened the door as soon as the car stopped at the station.

But there was not a moment when she did not see Carol in her mind, and all she saw, she seemed to see through Carol. That evening, the dark flat streets of New York, the tomorrow of work, the milk bottle dropped and broken in her sink, became unimportant. She flung herself on her-bed and drew a line with a pencil on a piece of paper. And another line, carefully, and another. A world was born around her, like a bright forest with a million shimmering leaves.