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neither one is safe and everything is equally dangerous. But for the sake of convenience —”
    “And also so that you won’t go out of your mind,” she said.
    “And so you won’t go out of your mind,” he agreed. “Well,” he said after a moment, “that makes two of us who are thinking about it.”
    “In one way or another, people live by myths,” she said.
    He racked his brain for something further to say on this or any other subject.
    Glancing around at the windows which went from floor to ceiling, the woman in the tweed suit said, “These vistas you have here.”
    He then looked and saw black night, with lighted buildings far below and many blocks away. “From our living room,” he said, “you can see all the way to the North Pole.”
    “We live close to the ground,” she said.
    But where? Cambridge? Princeton? Philadelphia?
    “In the human scale,” he said. “Like London and Paris. Once, on a beautiful spring day, four of us — we’d been having lunch with a visiting Englishman who was interested in architecture — went searching for the sky. Up one street and down the next.”
    She smiled.
    “We had to look for it, the sky is so far away in New York.”
    They stood nursing their drinks, and a woman came up to them who seemed to know her intimately, and the two women started talking and he turned away.
    O N her way into the school building, Laurie joined the flood from the school bus, and cried, “Hi, Janet … Hi, Connie … Hi, Elizabeth …” and seemed to be enveloped by her schoolmates, until suddenly, each girl having turned to some other girl, Laurie is left standing alone, her expression unchanged, still welcoming, but nobody having responded. If you collect reasons, this is the reason she behaved so badly at lunch, was impertinent to her mother, and hit her little sister.
    H E woke with a mild pain in his stomach. It was high up, like an ulcer pain, and he lay there worrying about it. When he heard the sound of shattered glass, his half-awake, oversensible mind supplied both the explanation and the details: Two men, putting a large framed picture into the trunk compartment of a parked car, had dropped it, breaking the glass. Too bad … And with that thought he drifted gently off to sleep.
    In the morning he looked out of the bedroom window and saw three squad cars in front of the drugstore. The window of the drugstore had a big star-shaped hole in it, and several policemen were standing around looking at the broken glass on the sidewalk.
    T HE sneeze was perfectly audible through two closed doors. He turned to Iris with a look of inquiry.
    “Who sneezed? Was that you, Laurie?” she called.
    “That was Cindy,” Laurie said.
    In principle, Iris would have liked to bring them up in a Spartan fashion, but both children caught cold easily and their colds were prolonged, and recurring, and overlapping, and endless. Whether they should or shouldn’t be kept home from school took on the unsolvability of a moral dilemma — which George’s worrying disposition did nothing to alleviate. The sound of a child coughing deep in the chest in the middle of the night would make him leap up out of a sound sleep.
    She blamed herself when the children came down with a cold, and she blamed them. Possibly, also, the school was to blame, since the children played on the roof, twelve stories above the street, and up there the winds were often much rawer, and teachers cannot, of course, spend all their time going around buttoning up the coats of little girls who have got too hot from running.
    She went and stood in the doorway of Cindy’s room. “No sneezing,” she said.
    Sneeze, sneeze, sneeze
.
    “Cindy, if you are catching another cold, I’m going to shoot myself,” Iris said, and gave her two baby-aspirin tablets to chew, and some Vitamin C drops, and put an extra blanket on her bed, and didn’t open the window, and in the morning Cindy’s nose was running.
    “Shall I keep her home