LITMIR.BIZ

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the Lincoln Memorial with the dim heroic figure of the great emancipator seated in the lighted sanctuary, and turned down the river again toward Georgetown.

      I was too troubled to notice the dirty sidings and belching smokestacks that always strike me after I leave the parkway and turn up 30th Street toward home. I couldn’t get Karen’s smile, and that victorious so-that’s-that gesture with her open palms, and the passionate justice of Jeremy’s voice, out of my mind. I unlocked the door and let myself in, and went along toward the sitting room. Downstairs I could hear Lilac banging pots and pans, and wondered what had happened now—the sounds of the kitchen being the perfect barometer of the state of our small nation. And in the living room door I stopped abruptly.

      Jeremy Candler was sitting hunched together on the ottoman in front of the fire, her little pointed face as pale as old ivory under her mop of burnished hair.

      “Hello,” I said.

      “Hello. I hope you don’t mind my barging in this way. Lilac says you’re not having anybody in tonight.”

      She turned quickly to the fire and started poking it, but not before I saw the trembling collapse around her red mouth, and the blinding flash of tears in her autumn-streaked eyes.

      “I think it’s swell,” I said. “Let me put my things up. I’ll be down directly.”

      I knew she wouldn’t want me to see her cry, so I changed into a house coat and pottered about, as Miss Doyle said, for a few minutes. When I came down she was still pale and still hunched together on the ottoman, but quite composed.

      “It’s snowing again,” I remarked.

      “That’s why I didn’t want to drive out to Alexandria,” she said. “My tires are frightfully smooth. I thought maybe you’d lend me some pajamas and let me stay all night. I’ve got to be at the office early in the morning.”

      It was far from me to say “My lamb, you’re telling the most frightful story.” I said:

      “I’m delighted. I can even give you a toothbrush I got at a one-cent sale yesterday.”

      “You really don’t mind?”

      “Really.”

      “Then I’ll call up . . . home.”

      She got up unsteadily, sat down in the end of the sofa and picked up the phone. After a moment she said, “William—this is me. Tell . . . my father I’m staying all night with a friend in Washington. Oh, I’m fine. Be sure to lock the side door, won’t you? Goodbye.”

      She sat there staring into the fire. I picked up the paper and looked through it. Finally, as if she recognized that neither of us was acting quite normally, she said, “I’ve got sort of . . . of a headache, so don’t mind if I’m . . . I’m stupid, will you?”

      “You’d probably like to go to bed early,” I said. “You’ll find some non-lethal sleeping pills in the bathroom, if you’d like one.”

      Just then the phone on the low table at the end of the sofa rang. I picked it up. A man’s voice that I didn’t recognize said, “Is Miss Candler there, please?”

      I glanced at Jerry. The quick fear that leaped into her eyes and the sharp panicky shake of her head really alarmed me, but I said in a quite normal voice, “Sorry. Would you like to leave a message?”

      “No, thanks,” the voice said. I put the phone down.

      “Was it . . . my father?” Jeremy whispered.

      I felt the sting of perfectly reflex tears in my own eyes—she so obviously hoped it was. I shook my head. “I’d have recognized his voice,” I said, and added my younger son’s “And how!” to myself. I don’t think I could mistake that firm utterly impersonal tone in a thousand years.

      “Maybe it was Sandy,” she said tentatively.

      “You do want one of them to care where you’ve got to, you poor baby,” I thought.

      “But you’d know his voice too, wouldn’t you?”

      She was trying desperately to sound as if it didn’t matter, and fortunately just then Lilac’s black moonflower countenance appeared in the dining room door.

      “Dinner’s served, madam,” she announced. She always goes slightly formal after she’s lighted my great-aunt Deborah’s Georgian candelabra, and she always drops it as instantly as she did now.

      “Miss Jerry, Ah ain’ goin’ take that plate till you eat every las’ moufful of you’ dinnah. You heah what Ah’m sayin’? You’ll go outa here an’ get pneumonia.”

      I watched the child choke down the rest of her creamed spinach, blinking back tears of perfectly unreasoning gratitude for somebody to care what she did. I sat there wondering how I’d ever been deluded into believing she was grown up and enormously efficient and direct when she was nothing but a hurt heart-hungry little girl. It would take Lilac, with the mother-instinct of her race, to know and understand that.

      After dinner she didn’t go upstairs. She simply sat in front of the fire, staring into it. She didn’t move when the doorbell rang. I don’t think she even heard it, or anything—not until Lilac’s voice came from the hall: “Ah don’ know if she’s in or not.”

      The voice I’d heard on the phone said, “Tell her I’d like to see her. I don’t want to bother her, but——

      “Ah’ll see,” Lilac said.

      I glanced at Jerry. She’d straightened up, her lips parted a little, a faint flush that may have been from the fire or the food Lilac had made her eat on her high pale cheekbones. She looked blankly at me. Then Lilac was in the door, and just behind her, towering considerably over her grey kinky head, were the lean dark face and blue Irish eyes of young Roger Doyle.

      “This gennaman wants to see Miss Jerry,” Lilac said.

      Since he was already in the room, I thought, there wasn’t much anybody could do about it. I got up.

      “Come in, Roger,” I said.

      Jeremy had turned away. Only the top of her burnished head with the firelight on it was visible, but I’d seen her little jaw tighten and the sudden smoldering embers in her eyes as she remembered, I suppose, that there was something about the young man in the door she didn’t like. Which was certainly not the impression I’d got when she first heard his voice.

      Roger Doyle could only see the molten-red-gold top of her head, and then the smoldering yellow gold-flecked eyes as she turned around. His face tightened.

      “I thought I’d come and see if you wouldn’t like to go home, Jerry,” he said stiffly.

      “Thanks—I’m staying all night with Grace.”

      He stood there, baffled and rapidly secreting adrenalin—or whatever it is people do when they start getting mad as hops in spite of all their will to keep cool and dispassionate.

      “As a matter of fact, you’re just being a blasted idiot,” he blurted out angrily.

      Which is a bad way to pour oil on the troubled waters, especially if they have red hair.

      Jeremy Candler straightened up, her eyes blazing.

      “Oh, am I?”

      Roger Doyle groaned. “Oh Lord, Jerry, can’t you see what you’re doing? Why don’t you let her have the filthy stock?”

      I got up.

      “If you two don’t mind,” I said, “I’ve got to see the man who does dogs.”

      But Jerry’s hand flashed out and held mine. “No, don’t go, Grace! Somebody’s got to stick by me!”

      Roger Doyle’s face went a shade darker. He started to speak, but Jerry was quicker.

      “If your father had kept

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