Therese looked down at the big cardboard box. "I don't want to take it." Her hands were full. "I can let Mrs. Osborne take the food out and the rest can stay here."

"Bring it," Carol said, going out the door. She carried down the last dribble of things, the books and the jackets Therese had decided at the last minute that she wanted.

Therese came back upstairs for the box. It had come an hour ago by messenger -- a lot of sandwiches in wax paper, a bottle of blackberry wine, a cake, and a box containing the white dress Mrs. Semco had promised her.

An unwanted dress still lay on the couch, a corner of the rug was turned back, but Therese was impatient to be off. She pulled the door shut, and hurried down the steps with the box, past the Kellys' who were both away at work, past Mrs. Osborne's door. She had said good-by to Mrs. Osborne an hour ago when she had paid the next month's rent.

Richard had had nothing to do with the box, she knew, or there would have been a book or an extra note in it.

Therese was just closing the car door, when Mrs. Osborne called her from the front steps. "Telephone call!" Mrs. Osborne shouted, and reluctantly Therese got out, thinking it was Richard.

It was Phil McElroy, calling her to ask about the interview with Harkevy yesterday. She had told Dannie about it last night when they had had dinner together. Harkevy hadn't promised her a job, but he had said to keep in touch, and Therese felt he meant it. He had let her come to see him backstage in the theater where he was supervising the set for Winter Town. He had chosen three of her cardboard models and looked very carefully at them, dismissed one as a little dull, pointed out some impracticality in the second, and liked best the hall-like set Therese had started the evening she had come back from the first visit to Carol's house. He was the first person who had ever given her less conventional sets a serious consideration. She had called Carol up immediately and told her about the meeting. She told Phil about the Harkevy interview, but she didn't mention that the Andronich job had fallen through. She knew it was because she didn't want Richard to hear about it. Therese asked Phil to let her know what play Harkevy was doing sets for next, because he said he hadn't decided himself between two plays. There was more of a chance he would take her on as apprentice, if he chose the English play he had talked about yesterday.

"Was that Richard?" Carol asked when she came back.

Carol looked at her for a long moment, then came over and examined the embroidery at the waist. "That's a museum piece. You look adorable. Wear it this evening, will you?"

"So you haven't heard from Richard?"

"I haven't for the last few days. He sent me a telegram this morning."

They were going to spend the night at Carol's house and leave early in the morning.

Therese put on the dress just before dinner. It hung below her calf, and the waist tied in back with long white bands that in front were stitched down and embroidered. She went down to show it to Carol. Carol was in the living room writing a letter.

"Will you put on that dress tonight?" Carol asked.

"I'll try it on. It looks like a wedding dress."

Phil said he might drop her a letter general delivery there.

"I don't know any address to give you yet," Therese said. "I know we'll get to Chicago."

"No. Phil McElroy."

"I think you should call him," Carol said. "Call him from my house."

"Look," Therese said, smiling.

Therese hesitated, then took it from her pocket and read it. "I have not changed, neither have you. WRITE TO ME. I LOVE YOU. RICHARD."

"Go ahead," Carol said, turning away. "Go on up and take it off."

"I'm sorry, Carol. I guess I didn't hear you."

"It's so elaborate." She didn't want to wear it, because it made her think of Richard.

Therese was going upstairs. "Is it what?"

"What the hell kind of style is it, Russian?"

They fixed dinner themselves, because Florence had already started her three weeks' leave. They opened some special jars of things that Carol said she had been saving, and they made stingers in the cocktail shaker just before dinner. Therese thought Carol's mood had passed, but when she started to pour a second stinger for herself, Carol said shortly, "I don't think you should have any more of that."

It was Harge still, Therese thought. Therese hesitated a minute, then went upstairs. She untied the waist and the sleeves, glanced at herself in the mirror, then tied them all back again. If Carol wanted her to keep it on, she would.

"Is it?" Carol repeated.

Carol's eyes had the angry white light she had seen in them the time she refused to play the piano. And what angered her now was just as trifling.

Therese gave a laugh. She liked the way Carol cursed, always casually, and when no one else could hear her.

"Where did you get this habit of not answering people?" Carol demanded, her voice suddenly harsh with anger.

And Therese deferred, with a smile. And the mood went on. Nothing Therese said or did could change it, and Therese blamed the inhibiting dress for not being able to think of the right things to say. They took brandied chestnuts and coffee up to the porch after dinner, but they said even less to each other in the semidarkness, and Therese only felt sleepy and rather depressed.

"My God," Carol said softly, and smiled. "Jacopo." She took the monkey and rubbed her forefinger against its slightly dirty white cheek. "Abby and I used to have him hanging in the back of the car," Carol said.

The next morning, Therese found a paper bag on the back doorstep. Inside it was a toy monkey with gray and white fur. Therese showed it to Carol.

"I suppose." Carol went on to the car with the monkey and a suitcase.

"Abby brought it? Last night?"

Therese remembered wakening from a doze on the glider last night, awakening to an absolute silence, and Carol sitting there in the dark, looking straight before her. Carol must have heard Abby's car last night.

Therese helped Carol arrange the suitcases and the lap rug in the back of the car.

"Call his family then. Aren't you going to thank them for the box they sent you?"

"Why didn't she come in?" Therese asked.

"I was going to write them a letter."

"Oh that's Abby," Carol said with a smile, with the fleeting shyness that always surprised Therese. "Why don't you go call Richard?"

"Call them now, and you won't have to write them a letter. It's much nicer to call anyway."

"Richard just left the house," Mrs. Semco said. "He's going to be awfully lonely. He mopes around already." But she laughed, her vigorous, high-pitched laugh that filled the kitchen where Therese knew she stood, a laugh that would ring through the house, even to Richard's empty room upstairs. "Is everything all right with you and Richard?" Mrs. Semco asked with the faintest suspicion, though Therese could tell she still smiled.

Mrs. Semco answered the telephone. Therese praised the dress and Mrs. Semco's needlework, and thanked her for all the food and the wine.

Therese sighed. "I can't now, anyway. He's left the house by this time." It was eight forty, and his school began at nine.

"Oh. Why not?"

Therese tried to hear anything in the shrill, rather matter-of-fact voice that resembled Carol's voice, but she couldn't.

"… at -- uh -- Mr. Byron's. It's a farm. Have you ever been there, Mother?"

"I'm still here."

"Hello," Rindy said. "Mother?"

Carol asked her if she had closed her window upstairs, and Therese went up again, because she couldn't remember. She hadn't closed the window, and she hadn't made her bed either, but there wasn't time now. Florence could take care of the bed when she came in on Monday to lock the house up.

Therese said yes. And she promised she would write. Afterward, she felt better because she had called.

"Where is it, sweetheart?"

Carol said: "At Mr. Byron's. He has horses. But not the kind you would like."

"Well, these are heavy."

Carol was on the telephone when Therese came downstairs. She looked up at Therese with a smile and held the telephone toward her. Therese knew from the first tone that it was Rindy.

"I've got to say good-by now. Daddy's ready to leave." And she coughed.

"Then don't cough into the phone."

"On the trip? Of course I will. Every day." Carol took the telephone and sat back with it, but she still watched Therese the minute or so more that she talked.

Carol had seen Rindy day before yesterday, Therese remembered. It had evidently been a pleasant visit, from what Carol had told Therese over the telephone, but she hadn't mentioned any details about it, and Therese had not asked her anything.

"Well, I can't because you're in school. But we'll have trips this summer."

"No."

"Have you got a cough?" Carol asked.

"She was telling me all about the big day yesterday. Harge let her play hooky."

"Can you still call me?"

Just as they were about to leave, Carol decided to make a last call to Abby. Therese wandered back into the kitchen, because the car was too cold to sit in.

"I wish you would take me on the trip."

"She sounds so serious," Therese said.

"I don't know any small towns in Illinois," Carol was saying. "Why Illinois?… All right, Rockford… I'll remember, I'll think of roquefort… Of course I'll take good care of him. I wish you'd come in, nitwit… Well, you're mistaken, very mistaken."

"Not a word," Carol said, drawling the phrase. "No one, so far as I know, not even Florence… Well, you do that, darling. Cheerio now."

Therese took a sip from Carol's half-finished coffee on the kitchen table, drank from the place where the lipstick was.

Five minutes later, they were leaving Carol's town on the highway marked on the strip map in red, the highway they would use until Chicago. The sky was overcast. Therese looked around her at the country that had grown familiar now, the clump of woods off to the left that the road to New York passed, the tall flagstaff in the distance that marked the club Carol belonged to.

Therese let a crack of air in at her window. It was quite cold and the heater felt good on her ankles. The clock on the dashboard said quarter to ten, and she thought suddenly of the people working in Frankenberg's, penned in there at a quarter of ten in the morning, this morning and tomorrow morning and the next, the hands of clocks controlling every move they made. But the hands of the clock on the dashboard meant nothing now to her and Carol. They would sleep or not sleep, drive or not drive, whenever it pleased them. She thought of Mrs. Robichek, selling sweaters this minute on the third floor, commencing another year there, her fifth year.

"Nothing." She did not want to talk. Yet she felt there were thousands of words choking her throat, and perhaps only distance, thousands of miles, could straighten them out. Perhaps it was freedom itself that choked her.

"Why so silent?" Carol asked. "What's the matter?"

"You know what I forgot?" Carol said. "A raincoat. I'll have to pick one up somewhere."

Somewhere in Pennsylvania they went through a section of pale sunshine, like a leak in the sky, but around noon, it began to rain. Carol cursed, but the sound of the rain was pleasant, drumming irregularly on the windshield and the roof.

And suddenly, Therese remembered she had forgotten the book she was reading. And there was a letter to Carol in it, one sheet that stuck out both ends of the book. Damn. It had been separate from her other books, and that was why she had left it behind, on the table by the bed. She hoped Florence wouldn't decide to look at it. She tried to remember if she had written Carol's name in the letter, and she couldn't. And the check. She had forgotten to tear that up, too.

"I didn't. It's still under the cloth."

"Carol, did you get that check?"

"Well, it's not important," Carol said.

"Caviar. How very, very nice of them," Carol said, looking inside a sandwich. "Do you like caviar?"

When they stopped for gas, Therese tried to buy some stout, which Carol liked sometimes, at a grocery store next to the gas station, but they had only beer. She bought one can, because Carol didn't care for beer. Then they drove into a little road off the highway and stopped, and opened the box of sandwiches Richard's mother had put up. There was also a dill pickle, a mozzarella cheese, and a couple of hard-boiled eggs. Therese had forgotten to ask for an opener, so she couldn't open the beer, but there was coffee in the thermos. She put the beer can on the floor in the back of the car.

"That check I gave you?-- You said you were going to tear it up."

"No. I wish I did."

"Why?"

Therese watched Carol take a small bite of the sandwich from which she had removed the top slice of bread, a bite where the most caviar was.

"How'd you happen to put cream in it that day?"

Therese poured more coffee into the cup they were sharing. She was acquiring a taste for black coffee. "How nervous I was the first time I held this cup. You brought me coffee that day. Remember?"

"Because people always like caviar so much when they do like it," Therese said.

Carol smiled, and went on nibbling, slowly. "It's an acquired taste. Acquired tastes are always more pleasant -- and hard to get rid of."

"I remember."

"I thought you'd like it. Why were you so nervous?"

Therese glanced at her. "I was so excited about you," she said, lifting the cup. Then she looked at Carol again and saw a sudden stillness, like a shock, in Carol's face. Therese had seen it two or three times before when she had said something like that to Carol about the way she felt, or paid Carol an extravagant compliment. Therese could not tell if she were pleased or displeased. She watched Carol fold the wax paper around the other half of her sandwich.

There was cake, but Carol didn't want any. It was the brown-colored spicecake that Therese had often had at Richard's house. They put everything back, into the valise that held the cartons of cigarettes and the bottle of whisky, with a painstaking neatness that would have annoyed Therese in anyone but Carol.

"Does he look like you?"

"I was born there, and my father's there now. I wrote him I might visit him, if we get out that far."

"Did you say Washington was your home state?" Therese asked her.

"Do I look like him, yes -- more than like my mother."

"It's strange to think of you with a family," Therese said.

Yes. Therese could imagine her, like a shadow of Carol, with all Carol's features weakened and diluted.

Carol smiled, her head lifted as she drove. "All right, go ahead."

Late in the afternoon, they stopped at a roadside restaurant that had a miniature Dutch village in the front window. Therese leaned on the rail beside it and looked at it. There was a little river that came out of a faucet at one end, that flowed in an oval stream and turned a windmill.

"One sister. I suppose you want to know all about her, too? Her name is Elaine, she has three children and she lives in Virginia. She's older than I am, and I don't know if you'd like her. You'd think she was dull."

"Brothers and sisters?" Therese asked.

"Why?"

"Because I just think of you as you. Sui generis."

Therese had been smiling, but something constricted her heart suddenly. It was too complicated to go into, and the conversation stopped there.

"I never told you about the train in Frankenberg's," Therese remarked to Carol. "Did you notice it when you --"

Carol ordered some soup for both of them. They were stiff and cold from the car.

"An electric train?" Carol interrupted her.

Little figures in Dutch costume stood about the village, stood on patches of live grass. She thought of the electric train in Frankenberg's toy department, and the fury that drove it on the oval course that was about the same size as the stream.

"I wonder if you'll really enjoy this trip," Carol said. "You so prefer things reflected in a glass, don't you? You have your private conception of everything. Like that windmill. It's practically as good as being in Holland to you. I wonder if you'll even like seeing real mountains and real people."

Therese felt as crushed as if Carol had accused her of lying. She felt Carol meant, too, that she had a private conception of her, and that Carol resented it. Real people? She thought suddenly of Mrs. Robichek. And she had fled her because she was hideous.

The old man from behind the counter was coming toward them. He had a limp. He stood by the table next to them and folded his arms. "Ever been to Holland?" he asked pleasantly.

Carol made her feel she had done nothing, was nothing at all, like a wisp of smoke. Carol had lived like a human being, had married, and had a child.

Carol answered. "No, I haven't. I suppose you've been. Did you make the village in the window?"

He nodded. "Took me five years to make."

"How do you ever expect to create anything if you get all your experiences second hand?" Carol asked, her voice soft and even, and yet merciless.

Therese looked at the man's bony fingers, the lean arms with the purple veins twisting just under the thin skin. She knew better than Carol the work that had gone into the little village, but she could not get a word out.

The man said to Carol, "Got some fine sausages and hams next door, if you like real Pennsylvania made. We raise our own hogs and they're killed and cured right here."

They went into the whitewashed box of a store beside the restaurant. There was a delicious smell of smoked ham inside it, mingled with the smell of wood smoke and spice.

Therese remembered standing in the delicatessen with Mrs. Robichek, her buying the thin slices of salami and liverwurst. A sign on the wall said they shipped anywhere, and she thought of sending Mrs. Robichek one of the big cloth-wrapped sausages, imagined the delight on Mrs. Robichek's face when she opened the package with her trembling hands and found a sausage. But should she after all, Therese wondered, make a gesture that was probably motivated by pity, or by guilt, or by some perversity in her? Therese frowned, floundering in a sea without direction or gravity, in which she knew only that she could mistrust her own impulses.

"Therese --"

Therese turned around, and Carol's beauty struck her like a glimpse of the Winged Victory of Samothrace.

"Let's pick something we don't have to cook," Carol said, looking into the refrigerated counter. "Let's have some of this," she said to the young man in the earlapped cap.

The young man slid all the bundles across the counter, and took Carol's twenty-dollar bill. And Therese thought of Mrs. Robichek tremulously pushing her single dollar bill and a quarter across the counter that evening.

Carol asked her if she thought they should buy a whole ham.

"See anything else?" Carol asked.

"I thought I might send something to somebody. A woman who works in the store. She's poor and she once asked me to dinner."

Carol frowned at her through her cigarette smoke. "Do it."

"Send it," Carol said. "Close the door and send her something."

"I don't really want to send her anything." Therese wanted suddenly to leave.

Carol picked up her change. "What woman?"

Later, in the car, Carol asked her about Mrs. Robichek, and Therese answered as she always did, succinctly, and with the involuntary and absolute honesty that always depressed her afterward. Mrs. Robichek and the world she lived in was so different from that of Carol, she might have been describing another species of animal life, some ugly beast that lived on another planet. Carol made no comment on the story, only questioned and questioned her as she drove. She made no comment when there was nothing more to ask, but the taut, thoughtful expression with which she had listened stayed on her face even when they began to talk of other things. Therese gripped her thumbs inside her hands. Why did she let Mrs. Robichek haunt her? And now she had spread it into Carol and could never take it back.

"I don't want to. Let's go, Carol." It was like the nightmare again, when she couldn't get away from her.

"Please don't mention her again, will you, Carol? Promise me."

Therese closed the door and chose one of the six-dollar sausages, and wrote on a gift card: "This comes from Pennsylvania. I hope it'll last a few Sunday mornings. With love from Therese Belivet."