"Do you have any preference as to restaurants?" the woman asked on the sidewalk.

"Hello."

"Hello," the woman said, smiling.

"Nothing." At least, the woman had recognized her, Therese thought.

"What's the matter?"

"No. It'd be nice to find a quiet one, but there aren't any in this neighborhood."

"Yes, certainly." It was twelve fifteen already. Therese knew she would be terribly late, and it didn't matter at all.

They did not bother to talk on the way. Now and then the crowds made them separate, and once the woman glanced at Therese, across a pushcart full of dresses, smiling. They went into a restaurant with wooden rafters and white tablecloths, that miraculously was quiet, and not half filled. They sat down in a large wooden booth, and the woman ordered an old-fashioned without sugar, and invited Therese to have one, or a sherry, and when Therese hesitated, sent the waiter away with the order.

"You haven't time for the East Side? No, you haven't, if you've only got an hour. I think I know a place a couple of blocks west on this street. Do you think you have time?"

"I remembered you," Therese said. She looked at the small pearl earrings, that were somehow no lighter than her hair itself, or her eyes. Therese thought her beautiful, though her face was a blur now because she could not bear to look at it directly. She got something out of her handbag, a lipstick and compact, and Therese looked at her lipstick case -- golden like a jewel, and shaped like a sea chest. She wanted to look at the woman's mouth, but the gray eyes so close drove her away, flickering over her like fire.

She took off her hat and ran her fingers through her blond hair, once on either side, and looked at Therese. "And where did you get the nice idea of sending me a Christmas card?"

"No. Only about two weeks."

"You haven't been working there very long, have you?"

"And you won't be much longer -- probably." She offered Therese a cigarette.

Therese took one. "No. I'll have another job." She leaned toward the lighter the woman was holding for her, toward the slim hand with the oval red nails and a sprinkling of freckles on its back.

"Christmas cards?" She smiled at herself.

"Of course not," Therese said.

"And do you often get inspired to send post cards?"

"Well, here's to Christmas." She touched Therese's glass and drank. "Where do you live? In Manhattan?"

"Post cards?"

"And what do you do in your spare time?" The lamp on the table made her eyes silvery, full of liquid light. Even the pearl at her earlobe looked alive, like a drop of water that a touch might destroy.

Therese told her. On Sixty-third Street. Her parents were dead, she said. She had lived in New York the past two years, and before that at a school in New Jersey. Therese did not tell her that the school was semi-religious, Episcopalian. She did not mention Sister Alicia whom she adored and thought of so often, with her pale-blue eyes and her ugly nose and her loving sternness. Because since yesterday morning, Sister Alicia had been thrust far away, far below the woman who sat opposite her.

"I --" Should she tell her she usually worked on her stage models? Sketched and painted sometimes, carved things like cats' heads and tiny figures to go in her ballet sets, but that she liked best to take long walks practically anywhere, liked best simply to dream? Therese felt she did not have to tell her. She felt the woman's eyes could not look at anything without understanding completely. Therese took some more of her drink, liking it, though it was like the woman to swallow, she thought, terrifying, and strong.

"I like this."

The woman nodded to the waiter, and two more drinks arrived.

"What?" Therese asked.

She might have been speaking of a doll, Therese thought, so casually had she told her she was pretty. "I think you are magnificent," Therese said with the courage of the second drink, not caring how it might sound, because she knew the woman knew anyway.

"I'm glad." Therese smiled, wondering if she were serious.

"You're a very pretty girl," she said. "And very sensitive, too, aren't you?"

"I like it that someone sent me a card, someone I didn't know. It's the way things should be at Christmas. And this year I like it especially."

She laughed, putting her head back. It was a sound more beautiful than music. It made a little wrinkle at the corner of her eyes, and it made her purse her red lips as she drew on her cigarette. She gazed past Therese for a moment, her elbows on the table and her chin propped up on the hand that held her cigarette. There was a long line, from the waist of her fitted black suit up to the widening shoulder, and then the blond head with the fine, unruly hair held high. She was about thirty or thirty-two, Therese thought, and her daughter, for whom she had bought the valise and the doll, would be perhaps six or eight. Therese could imagine the child, blond haired, the face golden and happy, the body slim and well proportioned, and always playing. But the child's face, unlike the woman's with its short cheeks and rather Nordic compactness, was vague and nondescript. And the husband? Therese could not see him at all.

Therese said, "I'm sure you thought it was a man who sent you the Christmas card, didn't you?"

"I did," she said through a smile. "I thought it just might be a man in the ski department who'd sent it."

"I'm sorry."

"No, I'm delighted." She leaned back in the booth. "I doubt very, much if I'd have gone to lunch with him. No, I'm delighted."

The dusky and faintly sweet smell of her perfume came to Therese again, a smell suggestive of dark-green silk, that was hers alone, like the smell of a special flower. Therese leaned closer toward it, looking down at her glass. She wanted to thrust the table aside and spring into her arms, to bury her nose in the green and gold scarf that was tied close about her neck. Once the backs of their hands brushed on the table, and Therese's skin there felt separately alive now, and rather burning. Therese could not understand it, but it was so. Therese glanced at her face that was somewhat turned away, and again she knew that instant of half-recognition. And knew, too, that it was not to be believed. She had never seen the woman before. If she had, could she have forgotten? In the silence, Therese felt they both waited for the other to speak, yet the silence was not an awkward one. Their plates had arrived. It was creamed spinach with an egg on top, steamy and buttery smelling.

But not in tedious detail. In six sentences, as if it all mattered less to her than a story she had read somewhere. And what did the facts matter after all, whether her mother was French or English or Hungarian, or if her father had been an Irish painter, or a Czechoslovakian lawyer, whether he had been successful or not, or whether her mother had presented her to the Order of St. Margaret as a troublesome, bawling infant, or as a troublesome, melancholy eight-year-old? Or whether she had been happy there? Because she was happy now, starting today. She had no need of parents or background.

"How is it you live alone?" the woman asked, and before Therese knew it, she had told the woman her life story.

Therese did not ponder it. It was right. She was still smiling, as if she had just learned how to smile and did not know how to stop. The woman smiled with her, amusedly, and perhaps she was laughing at her, Therese thought.

"What could be duller than past history!" Therese said, smiling. "Maybe futures that won't have any history."

"What's your name?" Therese asked. "Your first name?"

"Yes. The way you do," she answered. Carol pronounced her name the French way, Terez. She was used to a dozen variations, and sometimes she herself pronounced it differently. She liked the way Carol pronounced it, and she liked her lips saying it. An indefinite longing, that she had been only vaguely conscious of at times before, became now a recognizable wish. It was so absurd, so embarrassing a desire, that Therese thrust it from her mind.

"Nothing -- lately. If you'd like to visit me sometime, you're welcome to. At least there's some country around where I live. Would you like to come out this Sunday?" The gray eyes regarded her directly now, and for the first time, Therese faced them. There was a measure of humor in them, Therese saw. And what else? Curiosity and a challenge, too.

"I don't always know. Nothing in particular. What do you do?"

"What do you do on Sundays?" Carol asked!

"Yes," Therese said.

"Flung out of space," Carol said.

"How do you like it pronounced? Therese?"

"It's Czech. It's changed," Therese explained awkwardly. "Originally --"

"Please don't ever call me Therese," Therese said, pronouncing the "th."

"My name? Carol. Please don't ever call me Carole."

"What a strange girl you are."

"It's very original."

"Why?"

"What kind of a name is Belivet?" she asked.