"The club?" Sue slipped the script off her lap onto the middle sofa-cushion next to her. "Oh, the Business and Professional Women's thing. So what." Sue shrugged. "Then just don't."

"Don't join!" This was characteristic of Sue and though Fran was prepared for it she wasn't prepared for the anger that wanted to shake Sue conscious of the indignity that had been suggested.

"Please," Sue entreated, "don't look as if I'd proposed something nasty. If some people want to make it complicated then just let's forget it. We can live without them."

"If we don't meet the challenge we're reduced to nothing." Fran let the thought out cautiously as though picking them out from harsher ones.

"Nuts," Sue said, "tailor-made words. If they want to give us trouble, to hell with them."

"But who are 'they'?" Fran said. "Who . . ."

"What'id Miss Butinskie say?"

"Say?" Fran's thinking used the word like a sinking man would use a floating object on a turbulent sea. "She said if I dared to show my face at the club she'd simply expose us, that's all."

"Well then," Sue said, crossing her arms resolutely and as though righting a wrong, "don't go."

"But I must," Fran said.

"To hell with it." Sue lit a cigarette. "What evidence have they anyway."

"Don't you see?" Fran said, "if we ignore this we allow it." "Then do it. Or don't. I don't know. Why all the fuss?"

"Because it's not that simple, that's why," Fran said.

They fell silent. Raindrops came like rubber pebbles on the roof.

"Why not just say you've got so much to do with the bookshop and the read ing at night that you can't..."

"No!" Fran ripped off her reading glasses and tossed them onto the couch. "Can't you understand! To save us is only part of it. The other part is . . . is so much more than you and me it's thousands . . . millions of us! I can dismiss the whole thing, sure; make it easy for us, but what of the others? People like us? What of them!"

Sue pushed a slab of chewing gum slowly into her mouth. At the first sugary taste of it she was smiling; by the time she had it all in her mouth a frown had superseded the smile. "What kind of woman is this that contrives miseries!" Sue rose, uncurling her feet from under her and marched to the fireplace, tossing the gum wrapper into the dark, inanimate hearth. Despite her sincerity there was a show of histronics in her outburst. Fran had to smile in spite of herself.

It was so characteristic for Sue to be impressionable. And, again, so unlike her -this sudden unexpected understanding. Usually it was Sue's custom to unravel parchments of other people's thoughts . . . thoughts that she would snatch hurriedly at busy moments . . . so that she could take them and examine them again in her own time; take the wrinkles and creases out of these little wads and revise the syntax of biased ideas and phrases.

"Why pretend," Sue said, "you've been right all along. I put my hands in slings and I got no fractures. But I just . . . just don't want us to get into any trouble. It's been good up to now, regardless of some of the ups and downs." She sat heavily, wearily into the chair. "Oh why must we be subject to ... to things other happily married people aren't?"

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