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dining-room table, clearing away the paper plates with smears of dried ice cream. People began to sign mechanically as they said goodbye. Steve was still scowling slightly; Carl stood with one hand on the paper, businesslike, but proud. Mary knelt on the floor and struggled with Danny’s zipper. She got up and put on her own coat, smoothed her hair, put on her gloves and took them off again. When she could not think of anything else to do she walked past the dining-room table on her way to the door. Carl held out the pen.
    “I can’t sign that,” she said. Her face flushed up, at once, her voice was trembling. Steve touched her shoulder.
    “What’s the matter, honey?”
    “I don’t think we have the right. We haven’t the right.”
    “Mary, don’t you care how things look? You live here too.”
    “No, I—I don’t care.” Oh, wasn’t it strange, how in your imagination, when you stood up for something, your voice rang, people started, abashed; but in real life they all smiled in rather a special way and you saw that what you had really done was serve yourself up as a conversational delight for the next coffee party.
    “Don’t worry, Mary, she’s got money in the bank,” Janie said, “She must have. I asked her to baby-sit for me once and she practically spit in my face. She isn’t exactly a charming old lady, you know.”
    “I know she isn’t a charming old lady,” Mary said.
    Steve’s hand still rested on her shoulder. “Hey what do you think we are, a bunch of ogres?”
    “Nobody wants to turn her out just for the fun of it,” Carl said. “Its unfortunate. We all know that. But we have to think of the community.”
    “Yes,” said Mary. But she put her hands in the pockets of her coat and turned to say thank you to Edith, thank you for the birthday party. It occurred to her that they were right, for themselves, for whatever it was they had to be. And Mrs. Fullerton was old, she had dead eyes, nothing could touch her. Mary went out and walked with Danny up the street. She saw the curtains being drawn across living-room windows; cascades of flowers, of leaves, of geometrical designs, shut off these rooms from the night. Outside it was quite dark, the white houses were growing dim, the clouds breaking and breaking, and smoke blowing from Mrs. Fullerton’s chimney. The pattern of Garden Place, so assertive in the daytime, seemed to shrink at night into the raw black mountainside.
    The voices in the living room have blown away, Mary thought. If they would blow away and their plans be forgotten, if one thing could be left alone. But these are people who win, and they are good people; they want homes for their children, they help each other when there is trouble, they plan a community—saying that word as if they found a modern and well-proportioned magic in it, and no possibility anywhere of a mistake.
    There is nothing you can do at present but put your hands in your pockets and keep a disaffected heart.

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    Now that Mary McQuade had come, I pretended not to remember her. It seemed the wisest thing to do. She herself said, “If you don’t remember me you don’t remember much,” but let the matter drop, just once adding, “I bet you never went to your Grandma’s house last summer. I bet you don’t remember that either.”
    It was called, even that summer, my grandma’s house, though my grandfather was then still alive. He had withdrawn into one room, the largest front bedroom. It had wooden shutters on the inside of the windows, like the living room and dining room; the other bedrooms had only blinds. Also, the verandah kept out the light so that my grandfather lay in near-darkness all day, with his white hair, now washed and tended and soft as a baby’s, and his white nightshirt and pillows, making an island in the room which people approached with diffidence, but resolutely. Mary McQuade in her uniform was the other island in the room, and she sat mostly not moving where the fan, as