"Good," Eve Ferracci said, and stood up. "I shall make us some more coffee and then we shall have a real interview. An intelligent one, about real problems. in the theatre. I shall even speak about what off-Broadway really means to me, to all of us who work in it. Would you like that? Or," she hesitated in the kitchen. doorway, outlined in the light that poured through, and I thought of all the pictures of Italian sculpture that I had ever seen. "Or perhaps you don't have the time."

Then she had just stood there and looked at me without smiling and I felt that the question was a very final one and that I knew her and that she knew me and that we would have to talk to each other many mornings and many evenings; in many restaurants; in many theatres. I sat down on the couch and took off my gloves.

My mind came back to the room and Sel was saying a lot of things she had never said before and that she would be sorry about by the next day and that she would never even allow herself to think about again. "Of course, I guess no one at home would have believed long ago that of the two of us I would actually get married first. I mean before you. I mean you were always so pretty and everything. You should have seen all Rita's beaus, Dave. There was the time that Uncle Martin took out the telephone for six months once because of Rita's beaus forever calling. No, really-"

I knew it was years of having been the good-natured homely girl of Great Warrington that was finally coming out in my cousin. It was all mixed up with the satisfaction of feeling that I needed help at last about something that she had already achieved. About something that she couldn't know I didn't want, something I had gone to a great deal of trouble to keep her from knowing. The satisfaction of feeling that I needed her help in getting a man. Somehow it didn't bother me. I felt glad for the pleasure it gave her and I hardly listened. I was thinking of Eve's hands. The long, narrow hands that moved sometimes when she talked, that hesitated in the air when she arranged flowers. Hands that were like warm, soft night whispers.

Beaus would have meant so much to Sel, they had never meant anything to me. I could not remember that anything had meant very much to me. It seemed now that I had spent my youth waiting to find a pair of long. narrow hands that would hesitate near flowers and be like whispers on my arms. Hands of which one finger would wear a tiny, gold sliver, to glint and pick up the light and remind me that a woman for whom I felt I could die, also loved me that much. to wear that ring. We had argued a little about that. I had bought it for her one beautiful day after we had been together almost a year and she had been very pleased and held me a very long time and then I had said that it must only be worn at home, of course, and she, my Eve, had said no-that she would never take it off and the world be damned. And she had never taken it off, even on stage. It had worried me at first, and then the worry had gone away and then I was simply proud. But she had understood me better and brought the little box one evening containing the little flat, gold heart on the fragile, almost invisible, chain which she said could hide from the the world, yet lie quite near my heart.

I stirred to life again in my seat and looked at Dave and Sel. The desire to tell them surged up again in me. So much had gone before-little innocent phrases dropped now and then about other people-it had usually gone well. Understanding was so deep in them and when they should come to know Eve . . . I drew the

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