unusually good tennis player. It was in glorious and drunken celebration. of an almost perfect championship match that Jinny had been killed. The nearly new sun-yellow convertible had not even been worth salvaging. Had she lived these six years, she would have been just thirty, five years younger than Barbara King.

Thinking now of that evening, as she seldom allowed herself to do, Barbara drew a sharp breath and removed a brown-tipped cigarette from the pack she held in her hand. She regretted having assigned Shapiro's "Auto Wreck" to the class, not, she told herself. for the memories it evoked, but for quite another reason. She had been relieved when so few of them had grasped its inexorable conclusion-actually only one hadand a girl at that. "The poem made a deep impression on me. Mr. Shapiro is saying in effect, that if one thing has no cause (the accident), then perhaps nothing has cause." She was surprised that she remembered the exact wording of the theme. She also remembered her vague discontent with "made a deep impression on me." Her red marking pencil had hovered indecisively over the phrase. Trite? Childish? Finally she had underlined it. Possibly she would know better what to say when the time came, when she was talking to the girl in conference. She had come to rely on inspiration for the right criticism, an inspiration lent her by her own slight tension, by the necessity of the moment. This capability for excitement at the moment puzzled her. It was, she realized, what lent her classes the unmistakable life they had. But what caused it? This slightly feverish loquacity that fitted words to her tongue, that gave her daring, even at times magnificence, was a peculiar gift. She was, in dealing with her students at the same time quite removed from them, and intensely sensitive to their moods and

minds. She was, she knew, sometimes uncanny, and she was well liked. "You understand," or "I can never be phony with you," they said. But she could never escape her own sense of inner subterfuge. She liked her students, and while she taught them, knew them instinctively, deeply. But when they were gone, she forgot. Everyone on the campus said hello to her, but, unless they were in her term's classes, she did not know them, could never remember their names. It is almost, she thought, as if I cut them out of my mind intentionally.

A host of blackbirds rose from the sloping lawn in front of her, wheeled screaming, fluttering, pitched at last in a great circle up to that high wind and swept away, out of sight. Suddenly the day seemed chaotic, frightening. She lit the cigarette her hand had been holding. And then, stupidly lost, a single stray blackbird reeled across the sky. "Oh my God," she said, and crushed the cigarette against the low porch rail. She tried a smile, wondering if she could laugh at her own dramatic gesture. That's so damn like you, she thought. It probably knows perfectly well where it's going.

At that moment from the hill that sloped down in spacious lawn and dark evergreens to the cottage, a figure detached itself from a group of girls and raced down, flying in a great curve towards her. How did it go? "And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows,/ In all his something something, so few and such morning songs. It was the "and such" that made it Thomas, wasn't it?

The girl stood before her now, speechless. a little out of breath, radiant! For a moment in sheer delight, Barbara returned the golden smile.

"It's a good day for running." "Yes. I wanted to catch you-" Catch me? Barbara thought. "But I wasn't going anywhere—”