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leisurely visits to friends in South American mansions, French chateaux, Spanish casdes, Italian villas and the last few privately owned palaces in England. She did everything early, winning tennis matches, ski races and spelling bees from the time she was eight, putting her horses through intricate paces when she was ten, getting the lead in school plays as a freshman in high school. She was a superb dancer and converted one of the barns on Ashbrook Farm to a ballroom; if a week went by without an invitation to a ball or a square dance she gave her own. She could have excelled in mathematics, but she was too lazy; science bored her because every experiment had to be repeated. She collected art and tried her hand at painting, but soon discovered she had only enough talent to make it a hobby. She loved to read but had no library because she gave her books to others who would enjoy them. She never learned to cook, thinking it a waste of time when she could hire others who did it so well. She hated inexpensive wines. There was always a young man wanting to make love to her.
    When she was in high school her mother insisted she balance her parties and good times with volunteer work for organizations in New York and Maryland. So, with her friends who also had been volun-

    teered by their mothers, she spent a few hours each week working on balls, auctions and other fund-raisers for everything from the New York Public Library to cancer research. It all came under the name of Good Works, but it also was one long party, and from that came something even better: when she was a high-school senior, she was asked to appear for two minutes on an early-evening newscast on Maryland television to talk about a program to raise funds for a new maritime museum. She was young and lovely and poised beyond her years, and everyone thought she was sensational. Later, when she entered Stanford, society families in San Francisco and Palo Alto, who knew her parents, called her a few times to speak for them when a producer of an early-evening or noon news program offered a minute or two to publicize a good cause.
    "I don't do it very often," Valerie told Nick as they arrived at the Palo Alto television station a week after their lunch in his apartment. They had not gone riding after all; at the last minute he had been called in to his part-time job in the engineering department, to fill in for someone else. "I'd love to do more because ifs such a blast, but there's not a lot of free time for good causes on television. Anyway, I don't have time; I'm too busy with school."
    "You might manage to find time if they asked you more often," he said.
    She laughed. "You're right; I really love doing it, but I'm not going to camp on their doorstep and beg for more. I'm hardly a professional and I'm certainly not going to make it my life's work."
    "Why not?" Nick asked.
    She looked at him. "I don't know. I haven't thought about it. I haven't thought about any kind of life's work; I told you that. Anyway, nobody's telling me I'm the ideal television personality—good Lord, do you think that would be a compliment or a put-down? I just do favors for fi-iends, or friends of my parents, and what happens, happens. It's all fun and it can't do any harm."
    They walked into the studio and she led him to a folding chair at the side of the large, bare room. "You can sit here and watch. We're just taping a short pitch; it won't take long."
    He watched her greet the cameraman and a young woman who stood nearby, wearing headphones and carrying a clipboard. Valerie stepped up to a shabbily carpeted platform, where she sat in an armchair turned at an angle to hide a long tear in the fabric. Beside her was a table with a vase of drooping flowers.
    "Are there any fresh flowers?" she asked. She ran the cord from a

    tiny black microphone under her sweater, then clipped the microphone to her collar. "These ought to be tossed."
    "We'll get something else," said the woman with the