"You've got a hell of a crush on her," Richard announced, explanatorily and resentfully.

"I like being with her, I like talking with her. I'm fond of anybody I can talk to." The phrases of some letter she had written to Carol and never mailed drifted across her mind as if to answer Richard. I feel I stand in a desert with my hands outstretched, and you are raining down upon me.

Richard began it. "Why do you like her so much?"

It was an evening on which she had broken a date with Richard on the slim chance Carol would come by. Carol hadn't, and Richard had come by instead. Now at five past eleven in the huge pink-walled cafeteria on Lexington Avenue, she had been about to begin, but Richard was ahead of her.

"Does she know it? Of course she knows it." Richard frowned and drew on his cigarette. "Don't you think it's pretty silly? It's like a crush that schoolgirls get."

Therese took a deep breath. Should she be simple and say yes, or should she try to explain it? What could he ever understand of it, even if she explained it in a million words?

Kick me out, she thought. What was in or out? How did one kick out an emotion? She was angry, but she did not want to argue. She said nothing.

"Yes," she said.

"You're in a daze!"

"You don't understand," she said. She felt so very sure of herself. I will comb you like music caught in the heads of all the trees in the forest…

"Yes."

He frowned. "Leave you alone?"

"What's there to understand? But she understands. She shouldn't indulge you. She shouldn't play with you like this. It's not fair to you."

"Listen, Terry --" Richard wriggled in his chair and leaned forward, hesitated, then took another cigarette, lighting it distastefully, throwing the match on the floor. "You're in some kind of trance! It's worse --"

"I'm wide awake. I never felt more awake." She picked up the table knife and rubbed her thumb back and forth on the ridge at the base of the blade. "Why don't you leave me alone?"

"You mean, about Europe, too?"

"What's she doing, amusing herself with you? And then one day she'll get tired of you and kick you out."

"Not fair to me?"

No, she didn't understand a word.

"Just because I don't want to argue with you?"

"It's worse than being lovesick, because it's so completely unreasonable. Don't you understand that?"

"But you're going to get over it in about a week. I hope. My God!" He squirmed again. "To say -- to say for a minute you practically want to say good-by to me because of some silly crush!"

She looked over toward the steam tables, where people edged slowly along, choosing this and that, drifting toward the curve in the counter where they dispersed. "We may as well say good-by," she said, "because neither of us will ever be any different from what we are this minute."

He sat back. "Wednesday, next Saturday, you won't feel like this at all. You haven't known her three weeks yet."

"Therese, you're like a person gone so crazy, you think you're saner than ever!"

"I didn't say that. You said it." She looked back at him, at his rigid face that was beginning to redden in the center of the flat cheeks. "But why should I want to be with you if all you do is argue about this?"

"You make enough out of it to want to say good-by to me! What do you know about her?"

"Oh, let's stop it!"

Richard's hand with its row of knuckles embedded in the white, freckled flesh was clenched on the table motionless, like a picture of a hand that had hammered some ineffectual, inaudible point. "I'll tell you one thing, I think your friend knows what she's doing. I think she's committing a crime against you. I've half a mind to report her to somebody, but the trouble is you're not a child. You're just acting like one."

"Did she ever make any passes at you?"

"Why do you make so much out of it?" she asked. "You're practically in a frenzy."

"What do you know about her?"

"God!" Therese said. She felt like saying it a dozen times. It summed up everything, her imprisonment now, here, yet. "You don't understand." But he did, and that was why he was angry. But did he understand that she would have felt the same way if Carol had never touched her? Yes, and if Carol had never even spoken to her after that brief conversation about a doll's valise in the store. If Carol, in fact, had never spoken to her at all, for it had all happened in that instant she had seen Carol standing in the middle of the floor, watching her. Then the realization that so much had happened after that meeting made her feel incredibly lucky suddenly. It was so easy for a man and woman to find each other, to find someone who would do, but for her to have found Carol --"I think I understand you better than you understand me. You don't really want to see me again, either, because you said yourself I'm not the same person.

If we keep on seeing each other, you'll only get more and more -- like this."

"I wonder sometimes why you think you like me, or did like me. Because you didn't even know me."

"You don't know yourself."

"But I do -- and I know you. You'll drop painting someday and me with it. Just as you've dropped everything else you ever started, as far-as I can see. The dry-cleaning thing, or the used-car lot --"

"Terry, forget for a minute I ever said I wanted you to love me, or that I love you. It's you as a person, I mean. I like you. I'd like --"

"But why do you think you like me? Because I paint a little, too, and we can talk about that? I'm just as impractical as a girl friend for you as painting is as a business for you." She hesitated a minute, then said the rest of it, "You know enough about art anyway to know you'll never make a good painter. You're like a little boy playing truant as long as you can, knowing all the time what you ought to be doing and what you'll finally be doing, working for your father."

"That's not true," Richard said sullenly.

"Well -- yes. It's part of your hanging on when you know it's hopeless, and when you know you'll finally let go."

Richard's blue eyes had gone suddenly cold. The line of his mouth was straight and very short now, the thin upper lip faintly curling. "All that isn't quite the point now, is it?"

"Richard, there's no point --!"

"I will not!"

"You're going to change your mind, you know."

"You can't just give me marching orders out of your life," he said, flinging his long arms out, but there was a lonesome tone in it, as if he had already started on that road away from her. "What really makes me sore is that you act like I'm not worth anything, that I'm completely ineffectual. It isn't fair to me, Terry. I can't compete!"

She understood that. It was like a song he kept singing to her.

A week later, Richard stood in her room with the same expression of sullen anger on his face, talking in the same tone. He had called up at the unusual hour of three in the afternoon, and insisted on seeing her for a moment. She was packing a bag to take to Carol's for the week end.

If she hadn't been packing for Carol's house, Richard might have been in quite another mood, she thought, because she had seen him three times the past week, and he had never been pleasanter, never been more considerate of her.

"What logic," he said, rubbing the heel of his hand into his eye.

Therese watched him, caught by the idea that had just come to her, that she knew suddenly was a fact. Why hadn't it occurred to her the night of the theater, days ago? She might have known it from a hundred gestures, words, looks, this past week. But she remembered the night of the theater especially -- he had surprised her with tickets to something she particularly wanted to see -- the way he had held her hand that night, and from his voice on the telephone, not just telling her to meet him here or there, but asking her very sweetly if she could. She hadn't liked it. It was not a manifestation of affection, but rather a means of ingratiating himself, of somehow paving the way for the sudden questions he had asked so casually that night, "What do you mean you're fond of her? Do you want to go to bed with her?" Therese had replied, "Do you think I would tell you if I did?" while a quick succession of emotions -- humiliation, resentment, loathing of him -- had made her speechless, had made it almost impossible for her to keep walking beside him. And glancing at him, she had seen him looking at her with that soft, inane smile that in memory now looked cruel, and unhealthy. And its unhealthiness might have escaped her, she thought, if it weren't that Richard was so frankly trying to convince her she was unhealthy.

No, she thought, of course he couldn't. "I don't have any quarrel with you," she said. "It's you who choose to quarrel over Carol. She hasn't taken anything away from you, because you didn't have it in the first place. But if you can't go on seeing me --" She stopped, knowing he could and probably would go on seeing her.

Therese turned and tossed into the overnight bag her toothbrush and her hairbrush, then remembered she had a toothbrush at Carol's.

"Why are you so interested?"

"Just what do you want from her, Therese? Where's it going to go from here?"

She didn't answer.

Richard sighed, and twisted the newspaper in his hands. "I'm interested in you. You can't just say to me, 'Find someone else.' I've never treated you the way I treated the others, never thought of you that way."

"Damn!" Richard threw the newspaper at the bookshelf, and turned his back on her.

He stared at her and for a moment beneath the anger she saw the fixed curiosity she had seen before, as if he were watching a spectacle through a keyhole'. But she knew he was not so detached as that. On the contrary, she sensed that he was never so bound to her as now, never so determined not to give her up. It frightened her. She could imagine the determination transformed to hatred and to violence.

The newspaper flicked the Madonna, and it tipped back against the wall as if astonished, fell over, and rolled off the edge. Richard made a lunge for it and caught it in both hands. He looked at Therese and smiled involuntarily.

The Madonna lay in three or four pieces.

"Thanks." Therese took it from him. She lifted it to set it back then brought her hands down quickly and smashed the figure to the floor.

"Terry!"

"Never mind it," she said. Her heart was beating as if she were angry, or fighting.

"But --"

"To hell with it!" she said, pushing the pieces aside with her shoe.

Richard left a moment later, slamming the door.

What was it, Therese wondered, the Andronich thing or Richard? Mr. Andronich's secretary had called about an hour ago and told her that Mr. Andronich had decided to hire an assistant from Philadelphia instead of her. So that job would not be there to come back to, after the trip with Carol. Therese looked down at the broken Madonna. The wood was quite beautiful inside. It had cracked cleanly along the grain.

"You're not used to thinking of other people's feelings," Carol said bluntly to her.

Carol asked her in detail that evening about her talk with Richard. It irked Therese that Carol was so concerned as to whether Richard were hurt or not.

"What real reason have you to think he's not in love with you?" Carol asked.

Carol opened a panel in the bottom of the bookcase and took out a bottle. She poured some into an empty glass and slammed the panel shut. "Why did you do if now? Why not two months ago or two months from now? And why did you mention me?"

They were in the kitchen fixing a late dinner, because Carol had given the maid the evening off.

Then in the middle of dinner, in the middle of a conversation about the trip, Carol remarked suddenly, "You shouldn't have talked to Richard at all."

"Maybe I just don't understand how he works. But it doesn't seem like love to me."

Carol was not eating. Now she pushed back her chair and stood up. "You're much too young to know your own mind. Or what you're talking about. Yes, in that case, lie."

It was the first time Therese had told Carol any of it, any of the first conversation in the cafeteria with Richard. "Why not? Should I have lied to him?"

Therese laid her fork down. She watched Carol get a cigarette and light it. "I had to say good-by to him and I did. I have. I won't see him again."

"It probably does."

"I know -- I think it fascinates him."

"But if I simply don't see him again --" She couldn't finish it, about his not being apt to follow her, spy on her. She didn't want to say such things to Carol. And besides, there was the memory of Richard's eyes. "I think he'll give it up. He said he couldn't compete."

Carol struck her forehead with her hand. "Couldn't compete," she repeated. She came back to the table and poured some of the water from her glass into the whisky. "How true. Finish your dinner. I may be making too much of it, I don't know."

But Therese did not move. She had done the wrong thing. And at best, even doing the right thing, she could not make Carol happy as Carol made her happy, she thought as she had thought a hundred times before. Carol was happy only at moments here and there, moments that Therese caught and kept. One had been in the evening they put away the Christmas decorations, and Carol had refolded the string of angels and put them between the pages of a book. "I'm going to keep these," she had said. "With twenty-two angels to defend me, I can't lose." Therese looked at Carol now, and though Carol was watching her, it was through that veil of preoccupation that Therese so often saw, that kept them a world apart.

"A classic --" Her voice sounded tight and stifled. "A classic is something with a basic human situation."

"Lines," Carol said. "I can't compete. People talk of classics. These lines are classic. A hundred different people will say the same words. There are lines for the mother, lines for the daughter, for the husband and the lover. I'd rather see you dead at my feet. It's the same play repeated with different casts. What do they say makes a play a classic, Therese?"

When Therese awakened, the sun was in her room. She lay for a moment, watching the watery looking sunspots rippling on the pale green ceiling, listening for any sound of activity in the house. She looked at her blouse, hanging over the edge of the bureau. Why was she so untidy in Carol's house? Carol didn't like it. The dog that lived somewhere beyond the garages was barking intermittently, halfheartedly. There had been one pleasant interval last evening, the telephone call from Rindy. Rindy back from a birthday party at nine thirty. Could she give a birthday party on her birthday in April. Carol said of course. Carol had been different after that. She had talked about Europe, and summers in Rapallo.

She dressed in the plaid slacks she had brought from home, and one of the shirts she had left from another time, that had been laundered. It was twenty past eight. Carol liked to get up about eight thirty, liked to be awakened by someone with a cup of coffee, though Therese had noticed she never had Florence do it.

Therese got up and went to the window, raised it higher and leaned on the sill, tensing herself against the cold. There were no mornings anywhere like the mornings from this window. The round bed of grass beyond the driveway had darts of sunlight in it, like scattered gold needles. There were sparks of sun in the moist hedge leaves, and the sky was a fresh solid blue. She looked at the place in the driveway where Abby had been that morning, and at the bit of white fence beyond the hedges that marked the end of the lawn. The ground looked breathing and young, even though the winter had browned the grass. There had been trees and hedges around the school in Montclair, but the green had always ended in part of a red brick wall, or a gray stone building that was part of the school -- an infirmary, a woodshed, a toolhouse -- and the green each spring had seemed old already, used and handed down by one generation of children to the next, as much a part of school paraphernalia as textbooks and uniforms.

"Go ahead, miss," Florence said. "I'll just make my own fried eggs. You like doing things for Mrs. Aird yourself, don't you?" she said like a statement.

Florence was in the kitchen when she went down, but she had only just started the coffee.

"Good morning," Therese said. "Do you mind if I fix the breakfast?"

"Does she? She always used to eat two."

Therese was getting two eggs out of the refrigerator. "Yes," she said, smiling. She dropped one of the eggs into the water that was just beginning to heat. Her answer sounded rather flat, but what other answer was there? When she turned around after setting the breakfast tray, she saw Florence had put the second egg in the water. Therese took it out with her fingers. "She wants only one egg," Therese said. "That's for my omelette."

Florence hadn't minded the two other times she had come in and found Therese fixing them.

"Shouldn't you measure that egg anyway, miss?" Florence gave her the pleasant professional smile. "Here's the egg timer, top of the stove."

"Well -- she doesn't now," Therese said.

Finally only one chair remained by the round fountain, a prim little chair of white metal with a bulging bottom and four lacy feet. Therese looked at it and wondered who had sat there.

Therese shook her head. "It comes out better when I guess." She had never gone wrong yet on Carol's egg. Carol liked it a little better done than the egg timer made it. Therese looked at Florence, who was concentrating now on the two eggs she was frying in the skillet. The coffee was almost all filtered. In silence, Therese prepared the cup to take up to Carol.

"I wish there were more plays that happened out of doors," Therese said.

"What do you think of first when you start to make a set?" Carol asked. "What do you start from?"

Later in the morning, Therese helped Carol take in the white iron chairs and the glider from the lawn in back of the house. It would be simpler with Florence there, Carol said, but Carol had sent her away marketing, then had a sudden whim to get the furniture in. It was Harge's idea to leave them out all winter, she said, but she thought they looked bleak.

"You have to know a lot to be absolutely subjective, don't you? In those things you showed me, I think you're too subjective -- without knowing enough."

"The mood of the play, I suppose. What do you mean?"

"Do you think of the kind of play it is, or of something you want to see?"

"I think you're rather subjective. That's amateurish, isn't it?"

One of Mr. Donohue's remarks brushed Therese's mind with a vague unpleasantness. Carol was in an argumentative mood this morning. "I think you're determined to consider me an amateur," Therese said.

Therese made fists of her hands in her pockets. She had so hoped Carol would like her work, unqualifiedly. It had hurt her terribly that Carol hadn't liked in the least a certain few sets she had shown her. Carol knew nothing about it, technically, yet she could demolish a set with a phrase.

"I think a look at the West would do you good. When did you say you had to be back? The middle of February?"

"Not always." But she knew what Carol meant.

"Well, now I don't -- I just heard yesterday."

"What do you mean? It fell through? The Philadelphia job?"

"Oh, it's just this business," Therese said. Carol's hand was on the back of her neck, Carol's thumb rubbing behind her ear as Carol might have fondled a dog.

They heated the last cup of coffee and took it out to the white chair on the lawn and shared it.

"No," Therese said positively.

Therese was upstairs, changing her clothes, when she heard the telephone ring. She heard Florence say, "Oh, good morning, Mr. Aird. Yes, I'll call her right now," and Therese crossed the room and closed the door.

"Yes, I was."

"When?"

"You weren't going to tell me."

Therese was sitting on the edge of the fountain, one hand pressed against her ear because it was aching from the cold. "I don't particularly need one," she said.

"Are you very disappointed?"

"They called me up. They want somebody from Philadelphia."

"But I'd particularly like to see you in one."

"Sometime on the trip."

"Oh, baby. I'm sorry."

"Shall we have lunch out somewhere?" Carol asked her. "Let's go to the club. Then I ought to do some shopping in Newark. How about a jacket? Would you like a tweed jacket?"

Harge's car drove up as they walked into the living room. Carol went to the door, and Therese heard their greeting, Carol's only cordial, but Harge's very cheerful, and Carol came in with a long flower box in her arms.

Restlessly, she began to put the room in order, hung her clothes in the closet, and smoothed the bed she had already made. Then Carol knocked on the door and put her head in. "Harge is coming by in a few minutes. I don't think he'll be long."

Carol smiled. "No. Stay up here and read a book, if you want to."

Therese did not want to see him. "Would you like for me to take a walk?"

Carol was just coming from her room, and for an instant, Therese saw the same look of indecision cross her face that Therese remembered from the first moment she had entered the house. Then she said, "Come down."

Therese got the book she had bought yesterday, the Oxford Book of English Verse, and tried to read it, but the words stayed separate and meaningless. She had a disquieting sense of hiding, so she went to the door and opened it.

"How do you do?"

Harge's eyes narrowed a little, then opened. "Oh, yes. How do you do?"

Therese wished suddenly that she had brought Carol flowers, brought them on any of a half a dozen occasions past, and she remembered the flowers Dannie had brought to her one day when he simply dropped in at the theater. She looked at Harge, and his eyes glanced away from her, the peaked brow lifting still higher, the eyes darting everywhere, as if he looked for little changes in the room. But it might all be pretense, Therese thought, his air of good cheer. And if he cared enough to pretend he must also care in some way for Carol.

"Harge, this is Miss Belivet. I think you met her once," Carol said.

Florence came in, and Carol handed the flower box to her.

"Would you put these in something?" Carol said.

"Ah, here's that pipe. I thought so." Harge reached behind the ivy on the mantel, and brought forth a pipe.

"Everything is fine at home?" Carol asked as she sat down at the end of the sofa.

"Yes. Very." Harge's tense smile did not show his teeth, but his face and the quick turns of his head radiated geniality and self-satisfaction. He watched with proprietary pleasure as Florence brought in the flowers, red roses, in a vase, and set them on the coffee table in front of the sofa.

Harge lifted the flower to his nose. Half to Carol, half to Therese, he said, "It's a beautiful day. Are you going to take a drive?"

Harge thought a moment. "All right. I'll tell her."

"Of course." Carol got up, and she would have broken a flower, but Harge stepped forward and put a little knife blade against the stem and the flower came off. "They're very beautiful. Thank you, Harge."

"May I take one for Rindy?" Harge asked.

Harge made her a little bow. "Good-by."

"Yes, we were," Carol said. "By the way, I'd like to drive over one afternoon next week. Perhaps Tuesday."

Harge nodded once, in acquiescence, then looked at Therese. "Yes, I remember you. Of course. You were here about three weeks ago. Before Christmas."

"I'll speak to her on the phone. I meant tell your family."

As she went up the stairs, she heard Harge say, "Well, many happy returns, Carol. I'd like to say it. Do you mind?"

"Yes. One Sunday." Therese stood up. She wanted to leave them alone. "I'll go upstairs," she said to Carol. "Good-by, Mr. Aird."

"Excuse me. I must get something." He crossed the room quickly, went into the bathroom, and he was smiling as he came back with the razor in his hand. "You were in the restaurant with Carol last Sunday, weren't you?"

She closed the door and looked around the room, realized she was looking for any sign that she had spent the night. There was none. She stopped at the mirror and looked at herself for a moment, frowningly. She was not so pale as she had been three weeks ago when Harge saw her, she did not feel like the drooping, frightened thing Harge had met then. From the top drawer, she got her handbag and took her lipstick out of it. Then she heard Harge knock on the door, and she closed the drawer.

"Come in."

Carol's birthday, Therese thought. Of course, Carol wouldn't have told her.

"Yes," Therese said.

"Carol said you do stage designing."

"Yes."

He glanced from her face to her hands, to the floor, and up again. "I hope you see that Carol gets out enough," he said. "You look young and spry. Make her take some walks."

"But you said he was a hypocrite."

Carol was sitting on the sofa, smoking a cigarette. Harge had gone. She looked at Therese with a little smile. Then Florence came in and Carol said, "Florence, you can take these somewhere else. Put them in the dining room."

"Nothing of any importance." Carol was still smiling.

Carol winked at Therese.

"Therese!" Carol called suddenly. "Come down!"

"What did he say?"

"Oh!" Carol laughed. "It's not. It's my wedding anniversary. Get your coat and let's go."

As they backed out of the driveway, Carol said, "If there's anything I can't stand, it's a hypocrite."

Then he went briskly out the door, leaving behind him a faint shaving-soap scent. Therese tossed her lipstick onto the bed, and wiped her palms down the side of her skirt. She wondered why Harge troubled to let her know he took it for granted she spent a great deal of time with Carol.

"Yes, ma'am."

Nobody used the dining room, Therese knew. Carol preferred to eat anywhere else. "Why didn't you tell me it was your birthday?" Therese asked her.

"Par excellence."

"Oh -- just partially that."

"Pretending all this good humor?"

"If you insist," Carol said.

"Did he say anything about me?"

Was life, were human relations like this always, Therese wondered. Never solid ground underfoot. Always like gravel, a little yielding, noisy so the whole world could hear, so one always listened, too, for the loud, harsh step of the intruder's foot.

"He said you looked like a nice girl. Is that news?" Carol shot the car down the narrow road to the village. "He said the divorce will take about six weeks longer than we'd thought, due to some more red tape. That's news. He has an idea I still might change my mind in the meantime. That's hypocrisy. I think he likes to fool himself."

"Carol I never took that check, you know," Therese remarked suddenly. "I stuck it under the cloth on the table by the bed."

"What made you think of that?"

"I don't know. Do you want me to tear it up? I started to that night."