and see what the outside world looks like! I promise no more hurricanes-ANDthere is someone I am dying for you to meet!"

It had been the same sort of note the year before. A note fed then into the waste basket, hardly read and deeply resented. Tossed by frenzied hands. Hands still quivering with the freshness of already a year's grief. Grief, unlike the first months of numbed acceptance, full of the stark awareness of the utter finality and its everyday emptiness; grief full, at last, of the total realization of the true meaning of absolute irrevocability. And to whom could she explain the contest she had vowed to have with time? That awful contest she had promised herself never to let go of. Time indeed, she had sworn, months before Pip actually died, would never have its scar back. She would hold on to it, nourish it, keep it healthy, alive vibrant. She would feed it with memory-days, nightsalways. It was all that she would have left and she would keep it, agonizingly alive inside of her. This scar that was forged from the death of the woman she had loved.

She had come here even, to the sea, after two years to replenish the thing. To remind it of its depth. Something that Pip had loved and been romantic about; had allowed herself to be sentimental about the sea. Andrea had come at last two years later to let the breakers rush at her and the gulls scream at herexpecting that each wave, each cry overhead would raise up Pip's image before: her and give a new sustenance to her misery...

Andrea found the French door somehow and went out of it. She went down to the pier where the water had gone out and took off her shoes. She could hear the hum of the talk from the house and down the beach another party was in session at a house upon the bluff. And off in the opposite direction somewhere in the darkness up the beach someone was playing the guitar. Andrea lay back on the pier and looked up at the stars. The sand on the boards pricked at her flesh. She felt herself merge freely and simply with the night; she felt the utter sudden peace of the admission that she allowed at last to flood her being. It was after all true what was said of time. It won all contests. She smiled easily in the darkness. If time must win she might as well be gracious . . . She had really lost months ago, perhaps a year ago; and here at the face of the sea she knew she had been thoroughly defeated. It was true that being there had made her full of Pip-but not the Pip of death. But Pip laughing and Pip insulting pain and death; Pip working and Pip cracking her dreadful British jokes; and Pip being happy in her eyes because Andrea had come into a room. Pip in love

Pip alive. Slowly the other image was being driven away-the frightful emaciated woman in the hospital room, panting for life into the last desperate hours. And when she would take the picture and try to hold it in her mindthe sound of the breathing would presently turn into that roar of laughter that could disturb the Gods . . . Pip—Pip was becoming in death what she had been in life what Andrea had forbidden her to be-happiness.

Perhaps, Pip, her teacher in so many things, was still teaching her. Perhaps this was the farewell lesson. Maybe it was after all as she had insisted in their years together, that there was no such thing as a pure existence, that each thing bore within it it's opposite, or at least its own contradiction. True even of life and death. That death decay could only depend upon the Living for its nourishment and that Life, in its turn could not go on-without death.

It was a long time after the parties had ended along the beach that Andrea finally roused herself and wandered, at last, up the beach toward the guitar.

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