On Tuesday, the fifth day of work, Therese sat in a little bare room with no ceiling at the back of the Black Cat Theatre, waiting for Mr. Donohue, the new director, to come and look at her cardboard model. Yesterday morning, Donohue had replaced Cortes as director, had thrown out her first model, and also thrown out Phil McElroy as the second brother in the play. Phil had walked out yesterday in a huff. It was lucky she hadn't been thrown out along with her model, Therese thought, so she had followed Mr. Donohue's instructions to the letter. The new model hadn't the movable section she had put into the first, which would have permitted the living- room scene to be converted into the terrace scene for the last act. Mr. Donohue seemed to be adamant against anything unusual or even simple. By setting the whole play in the living room, a lot of the dialogue had to be changed in the last act, and some of the cleverest lines had been lost. Her new model indicated a fireplace, broad French windows giving onto a terrace, two doors, a sofa, and a couple of armchairs and a bookcase. It would look, when finished, like a room in a model house at Sloan's, lifelike down to the last ash tray.

Therese stood up, stretched herself, and reached for the corduroy jacket that was hanging on a nail in the door. The place was cold as a barn. Mr. Donohue probably wouldn't come in until afternoon, or not even today if she didn't remind him again. There was no hurry about the scenery. It might have been the least important matter in the whole production, but she had sat up until late last night, enthusiastically working on the model.

She went out to stand in the wings again. The cast was all on stage with scripts in hand. Mr. Donohue kept running the cast through the whole play, to get the flow of it, he said, but today it seemed to be only putting them to sleep. All the cast looked lazy except Tom Harding, a tall blond young man who had the male lead, and he was a little too energetic. Georgia Halloran was suffering from sinus headaches, and had to stop every hour to put drops in her nose and lie down for a few minutes. Geoffrey Andrews, a middle-aged man who played the heroine's father, grumbled constantly between his lines because he didn't like Donohue.

Therese watched him waving his arms to indicate the speakers, putting up a hand to silence them, following the script with his head down as if he led an orchestra. Tom Harding winked at her, and pulled his hand down his nose. After a moment, Therese went back to the room behind the partition, where she worked, where she felt a little less useless. She knew the play almost by heart now. It had a rather Sheridanesque comedy of errors plot -- two brothers who pretend to be valet and master in order to impress an heiress with whom one of the brothers is in love. The dialogue was gay and altogether not bad, but the dreary, matter-of-fact set that Donohue had ordered for it -- Therese hoped something could be done with the color they would use.

"No, no, no, no," said Mr. Donohue for the tenth time that morning, stopping everything and causing everybody to lower his script and turn to him with a puzzled, irritated docility. "Let's start again from page twenty-eight."

Mr. Donohue did come in just after twelve o'clock. He looked at her model, lifted it up and looked at it from below and from both sides, without any change in his nervous, harassed expression. "Yes, this is fine. I like this very much. You see how much better this is than those empty walls you had before, don't you?"

Therese took a deep breath of relief. "Yes," she said.

"A set grows out of the needs of the actors. This isn't a ballet set you're designing, Miss Belivet."

"The carpenter's coming in this afternoon about four. We'll get together and have a talk about this." Mr.

She nodded, looking at the model, too, and trying to see how it possibly was better, possibly more functional.

Therese stared at the cardboard model. At least she would see it used. At least she and the carpenters would make it something real. She went to the window and looked out at the gray but luminous winter sky, at the backs of some five-story houses garlanded with fire escapes. In the foreground was a small vacant lot with a runted leafless tree in it, all twisted up like a signpost gone wild. She wished she could call Carol and invite her for lunch. But Carol was an hour and a half away by car.

"Is your name Beliver?"

Donohue went out.

"The phone by the lights."

Therese turned to the girl in the doorway. "Belivet. Telephone?"

"Thanks." Therese hurried, hoping it was Carol, knowing more likely it was Richard. Carol hadn't yet called her here.

"Hello, this is Abby."

"Abby?" Therese smiled. "How'd you know I was here?"

"You told me, remember? I'd like to see you. I'm not far away. Have you had lunch yet?"

"Hi," Abby said as she came up. "You're looking very chipper. I almost didn't recognize you. Would you like a drink?"

Therese whistled a song as she walked there, happy as if she were meeting Carol. The restaurant had sawdust on the floor, and a couple of black kittens played around under the rail of the bar. Abby was sitting at a table in the back.

Therese took the cigarette that Abby offered her. Abby knew, she thought.

They agreed to meet at the Palermo, a restaurant a block or two from the Black Cat.

Therese shook her head. "No, thanks."

And perhaps she was in love with Carol, too. It put Therese on guard with her. It created a tacit rivalry that gave her a curious exhilaration, a sense of certain superiority over Abby -- emotions that Therese had never known before, never dared to dream of, emotions consequently revolutionary in themselves. So their lunching together in the restaurant became nearly as important as the meeting with Carol.

"You mean, you're so happy without it?" Abby asked, and she chuckled with that secret amusement that in Abby was somehow not offensive.

"Excellent, madame!" He beamed at her as if she were a special customer.

"She's very fine," Abby said, watching her.

"How is Carol?" Therese asked. She had not seen Carol in three days.

The waiter came, and Abby asked him if he could recommend the mussels and the scaloppine.

"Thanks." Therese played with the lid of the grated cheese bowl in front of her. "Do you know anyone called Andronich? I think he's from Philadelphia."

"I know some people in the producing end of the theater," Abby said. "I'll be glad to put in a word for you any time."

It was Abby's manner, the glow in her face as if today, or every day, were a special holiday for her. Therese liked that. She looked admiringly at Abby's suit of red and blue weave, her cuff links that were scrolly G's, like filigree buttons in silver. Abby asked her about her job at the Black Cat. It was tedious to Therese, but Abby seemed impressed. Abby was impressed, Therese thought, because she did nothing herself.

Mr. Donohue had told her to go and see Andronich next week in New York.

"No," Abby said.

"And you know her husband, too, of course."

He was producing a show that would open this spring in Philadelphia, and then on Broadway.

"Try the mussels," Abby was eating hers with gusto. "Carol likes these, too."

Abby nodded again, silently.

"Have you known Carol a long time?"

"Um-hm," Abby nodded, looking at her with the bright eyes that revealed nothing.

Therese smiled a little. Abby was out to question her, she felt, but not to disclose anything about herself or about Carol.

Then the main course arrived, and two waiters fussed around the table, uncorking the Chianti, pouring more water and bringing fresh butter. The radio in the corner played a tango -- a little cheesebox of a radio with a broken front, but the music might have come from a string orchestra behind them, at Abby's request. No wonder Carol likes her, Therese thought. She complemented Carol's solemnity, she could remind Carol to laugh.

"How about some wine? Do you like Chianti?" Abby summoned a waiter with a snap of her fingers. "Bring us a bottle of Chianti. A good one. Builds up the blood," she added to Therese.

"I've had jobs. Two or three of them. Didn't Carol tell you we had a furniture shop once? We had a shop just outside of Elizabeth on the highway. We bought up antiques or plain second-hand stuff and fixed it up. I never worked so hard in my life." Abby smiled at her gaily, as if every word might be untrue. "Then my other job. I'm an entomologist. Not a very good one, but good enough to pull bugs out of Italian lemon crates and things like that. Bahama lilies are full of bugs."

"Did you always live by yourself?" Abby asked.

"Yes. Since I got out of school." Therese sipped her wine. "Do you? Or do you live with your family?"

"And do you work?" Therese ventured.

"So I've heard." Therese smiled.

"I don't think you believe me."

"With my family. But I've got my own half of the house."

"I'm on reserve. Just in time of emergency, I work. Like Easter."

"Yes, I do. Do you still work at that?"

Therese watched Abby's fork cutting the scaloppine into small bites before she picked any up. "Do you take trips a lot with Carol?"

And Abby waited, for a precise description of that meeting, Therese knew, but she wouldn't give it to Abby or to anyone else. It belonged to her.

"I waited on her," Therese said, and stopped.

"She just said she met you at Frankenberg's when you had a job there."

"How'd you meet Carol?" Abby asked.

"A lot? No, why?" Abby asked.

"I should think you'd be good for her. Because Carol's so serious."

The wine in her head promised music or poetry or truth, but she was stranded on the brink. Therese could not think of a single question that would be proper to ask, because all her questions were so enormous.

"Not all the time," Abby corrected, with the laughter under the surface of her voice, as it had been in the first word Therese had heard her say.

"You just started talking?" Abby asked with a smile, lighting a cigarette.

Therese wished she could lead the conversation to the heart of things, but just what the heart of things was, she didn't know. The wine ran slow and warm in her veins, down to her finger tips.

"Well, that's how," Therese said, feeling a resentment her against Abby building up, incontrollably.

"Didn't Carol tell you?"

"Do you mean that's why she sees me?" Therese asked calmly. "Do you want to tell me I shouldn't see her?"

Surely Carol hadn't told Abby, she thought, told her the silly story of the Christmas card. It wouldn't be important enough to Carol for Carol to have told her.

"You know Carol's got a lot of worries right now, don't you?"

"And she's lonely now," Abby added, her eyes watching.

"Why do you?"

"You're awfully young, aren't you? Are you twenty-one?"

"No. Not quite."

Abby's eyes still laughed. "I've known Carol since she was four years old."

"Do you mind telling me who started talking first?"

Therese said nothing.

"Yes."

"Why do I? Why do you?"

"You like her a lot, don't you?" Abby asked.

Abby's unblinking eyes blinked twice after all. "No, not a bit. But I don't want you to get hurt. I don't want you to hurt Carol either."

Therese explored it for hostility. It was not hostile, but jealous. "Yes."

Therese laughed suddenly. She reached for a cigarette and lighted it, still smiling. No, Carol hadn't told her about the Christmas card, and Abby's question struck her as terribly funny. "I did," Therese said.

"Oh. I was going to give you the address anyway, but if you won't come --"

"Thanks. I don't think I should go. I may have to work late today, too."

"I'd never hurt Carol," Therese said. "Do you think I would?"

"No," Therese said.

Abby was still watching her alertly, had never taken her eyes from her.

But Therese did not like the smile or the question, and realizing her face showed her feelings, she looked down at the table. There was a glass of hot zabaglione standing on a plate in front of her.

Abby wanted to walk around the block after they came out of the restaurant. Therese agreed, though she was tired of Abby now. Abby with her cocksureness, her blunt, careless questions made Therese feel she had gotten an advantage over her. And Abby had not let her pay the check.

"Would you like to come to a cocktail party this afternoon, Therese? It's uptown at about six o'clock. I don't know if there'll be any stage designers there, but one of the girls who's giving it is an actress."

"No. She won't be. But they're all easy to get along with. It's a small party."

Therese put her cigarette out. "Is Carol going to be there?"

"No, I don't think you would," Abby replied as if she had just decided it. And she smiled now as if she were especially pleased about something.

"Does she?" Therese said, only half believing it. "She never told me."

She wanted to walk faster, but Abby held their pace back.

Therese glanced and saw Abby smiling at her, guilelessly. "She didn't say anything to me about that either," Therese said quietly, though her heart had begun pumping.

Abby said, "Carol thinks a lot of you, you know. She says you have a lot of talent."

"I'm sure she will. You'll go with her, won't you?"

"You must know she thinks a lot of you, if she wants you to take a trip with her."

Why should Abby know about it before she did, Therese wondered. She felt a flush of anger in her face.

What was it all about? Did Abby hate her?

If she did, why wasn't she consistent about it? Then in the next instant, the rise of anger fell and left her weak, left her vulnerable and defenseless. She thought, if Abby pressed her against the wall at that moment and said: "Out with it. What do you want from Carol? How much of her do you want to take from me?" she would have babbled it all. She would have said: "I want to be with her. I love to be with her, and what has it got to do with you?"

"Win what?"

Therese took it. "So long," she said. She watched Abby walking toward Washington Square, her step quicker now, her curly head high.

Abby stopped walking. "I'm sorry," she said, turning to her. "I think I understand better now."

"Isn't that for Carol to talk about? Why do you ask me these things?" Therese made an effort to sound indifferent. It was hopeless.

"Understand what?"

"What," Abby echoed with her head up, looking up at the corner of a building, at the sky, and Therese suddenly felt furiously impatient.

"No wonder Carol thinks such a lot of you," Abby said, but if it was a kind remark, Therese did not accept it as such. "So long, Therese. I'll see you again no doubt." Abby held out her hand.

"Just -- that you win."

She wanted Abby to go so she could telephone Carol. Nothing mattered but the sound of Carol's voice. Nothing mattered but Carol, and why did she let herself forget for a moment?

Therese went into the drugstore at the next corner and called Carol. She got the maid and then Carol.

"Dannie!" she called.

Dannie smiled down at her. "What time is it? I've been studying till I'm blind."

Therese came out of the drugstore smiling. Carol was going to pick her up at five thirty. Carol insisted on picking her up, because it was such a rotten trip by train.

Across the street, walking away from her, she saw Dannie McElroy, striding along without a coat, carrying a naked bottle of milk in his hand.

"Nothing. It's dull at work."

Dannie turned and walked toward her. "Come by for a few minutes?" he yelled.

"It clears my head." He held the iron gate for her that led to his door. "Phil's out somewhere."

"After two." She felt Dannie's arm tensed hard against the cold. There were goose-pimples under the dark hair on his forearm. "You're mad to go out without a coat," she said.

"Are you doing anything tonight? Would you like to come out?"

Therese started to say no, then as he came up to her, she took his arm. "Just for a minute. I've had a long lunch hour already."

"What's the matter?" Carol asked. "You sound low."

The room smelled of pipe smoke, rather like hot chocolate cooking. The apartment was a semi-basement, generally darkish, and the lamp made a warm pool of light on the desk that was always cluttered. Therese looked down at the opened books on his desk, the pages and pages covered with symbols that she could not understand, but that she liked to look at. Everything the symbols stood for was true and proven. The symbols were stronger and more definite than words. She felt Dannie's mind swung on them, from one fact to another, as if he bore himself on strong chains, hand over hand through space. She watched him assembling a sandwich, standing at the kitchen table. His shoulders looked very broad and rounded with muscle under his white shirt, shifting a little with the motions of laying the salami and cheese slices onto the big piece of rye bread.

"I will," Therese said. She sat down in his desk chair that was half turned around. She had come once for lunch, and once after work. She liked visiting Dannie. One did not have to make small talk with him.

"I wish you'd come by more often, Therese. Wednesday's the only day I'm not home at noon. We wouldn't bother Phil, having lunch, even if he's sleeping."

Dannie's beer can hissed as he opened it. He leaned against the wall with the beer and the sandwich, smiling, delighted to have her here. "Remember what you said about physics not applying to people?"

In the corner of the room, Phil's sofa bed was unmade, a tangle of blankets and sheets. The two times she had come in before, the bed had been unmade, or Phil had still been in it. The long bookcase pulled out at right angles to the sofa made a unit of Phil's corner of the room, and it was always in disorder, in a frustrated and nervous disorder not at all like the working disorder of Dannie's desk.

"Well, I'm not sure you're right," he said as he took a bite. "Take friendships, for instance. I can think of a lot of cases where the two people have nothing in common. I think there's a definite reason for every friendship just as there's a reason why certain atoms unite and others don't -- certain missing factors in one, or certain present factors in the other -- what do you think? I think friendships are the result of certain needs that can be completely hidden from both people, sometimes hidden forever."

"Umm. Vaguely."

Richard got on with people, elbowed his way through the world in a way she, couldn't. She had always been attracted to people with Richard's kind of self-assurance. "And what's weak about you, Dannie?"

"Me?" he said, smiling. "Do you want to be my friend?"

"Yes. But you're about the strongest person I know."

"Maybe. I can think of a few cases, too." Richard and herself, for one.

"Really? Shall I enumerate my shortcomings?"

She smiled, looking at him. A young man of twenty-five who had known where he was going since he was fourteen. He had driven all his energy into one channel -- just the opposite of what Richard had done.

"I have a secret and very buried need for a cook," Dannie said, "and a dancing teacher, and someone to remind me to do little things like take my laundry and get haircuts."

"Oh," he said sadly. "Then it's out. And I'd had some hope. I'd had a little feeling of destiny. Because you see what I mean about affinities is true from friendships down to even the accidental glance at someone on the street, there's always a definite reason somewhere. I think even the poets would agree with me."

"I can't remember to take my laundry either."

She smiled."Even the poets?" She thought of Carol, and then of Abby, of their conversation at lunch that had been so much more than a glance and so much less, and the sequence of emotions it had evoked in her. It depressed her. "But you have to make allowances for people's perversities, things that don't make much sense."

"I thought it was used by the psychologists, "Therese said.

"With whom?"

"Perversities? That's only a subterfuge. A word used by the poets."

"I mean, to make allowances -- that's a meaningless term. Life is an exact science on its own terms, it's just a matter of finding them and defining them. What doesn't make any sense to you?"

"Nothing. I was thinking of something that doesn't matter anyway." She was suddenly angry again, as she had been on the sidewalk after the lunch.

"What?" he persisted, frowning.

"Like the lunch I just had," she said.

"It doesn't matter. If it did, I'd go into it. It's just a waste, like losing something, I thought. But maybe something that didn't exist anyway." She had wanted to like Abby because Carol did.

Dannie looked at her for a moment, then pushed himself off from the wall. He turned to the stove, and got a match from his shirt pocket, and Therese sensed that the conversation dangled, would always dangle and never be finished, whatever they went on to say. But she felt if she told Dannie every word that she and Abby had exchanged, that he could clear away its subterfuges with a phrase, as if he sprinkled a chemical in the air that would dry up the mist instantly. Or was there always something that logic couldn't touch? Something illogical, behind the jealousy, the suspicion and the hostility in Abby's conversation, that was Abby all by herself?

"Yes -- but there are some people or some things people do that you can't salvage anything from finally, because nothing connects with you." It was of something else she wanted to talk about, though, not this at all. Not Abby or Carol, but before. Something that made perfect connection and perfect sense. She loved Carol. She leaned her forehead against her hand.

"Except in your mind? That can still be a loss."

"Everything's not as simple as a lot of combinations," Therese added.

"I feel as if it were growing, like a plant, not disappearing. I feel everything in the world must have the texture of a plant sometimes to a poet. Even this table, like my own flesh." He touched the table edge with his palm; "It's like a feeling I had once riding up a hill on a horse. It was in Pennsylvania. I didn't know how to ride very well then, and I remember the horse turning his head and seeing the hill, and deciding by himself to run up it, his hind legs sank before we took off, and suddenly we were going like blazes and I felt completely in harmony with the horse and the land, as if we were a whole tree simply being stirred by the wind in its branches. I remember being sure that nothing would happen to me then, but some other time, yes, eventually. And it made me very happy. I thought of all the people who are afraid and hoard things, and themselves, and I thought, when everybody in the world comes to realize what I felt going up the hill, then there'll be a kind of right economy of living and of using and using up. Do you know what I mean?" Dannie had clenched his fist, but his eyes were bright as if he still laughed at himself. "Did you ever wear out a sweater you particularly liked, and throw it away finally?"

"Some things don't react. But everything's alive." He turned around with a broad smile, as if quite another train of thought had entered his head. He was holding up the match that was still smoking. "Like this match. And I'm not talking physics, about the indestructibility of smoke. In fact, I feel rather poetic today."

"About the match?"

She thought of the green woolen gloves of Sister Alicia that she had neither worn nor thrown away. "Yes," she said.

"Well, that's all I mean. And the lambs who didn't realize how much wool they were losing when somebody sheared them to make the sweater, because they could grow more wool. It's very simple." He turned to the coffeepot that he had reheated, that was already boiling.

"Yes." She knew. And like Richard and the kite, because he could make another kite. She thought of Abby with a sense of vacuity suddenly, as if the luncheon had been eradicated. For an instant, she felt as if her mind had overflowed a brim and was swimming emptily into space. She stood up.

Dannie came toward her, put his hands on her shoulders, and though she felt it was only a gesture, a gesture instead of a word, the spell was broken. She was uneasy at his touch, and the uneasiness was a point of concreteness. "I should go back," she said. "I'm way late."

His hands came down, pinning her elbows hard against her sides, and he kissed her suddenly, held his lips hard against hers for a moment, and she felt his warm breath on her upper lip before he released her.

"All right." She smiled, too, and put her hand out automatically and Dannie shook it once, politely.

"I suppose." She buttoned her coat. "I must go," she said, moving toward the door.

She shook her head. "I don't think so."

Dannie swung the door open for her, smiling his easy smile, as if nothing had happened. "Come back tomorrow? Come for lunch."

"You are," he said, looking at her.

"Why did you --" She stopped, because the kiss had so mingled tenderness and roughness, she didn't know how to take it.

"No," she said.

"Would Richard mind?"

"All right, come Monday."

She ran the two blocks to the Black Cat. A little like the horse, she thought. But not enough, not enough to be perfect, and what Dannie meant was perfect.

"'Why,'Terry," he said, turning away from her, smiling. "Did you mind?"