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he is projecting his own frustration upon her in an unwarranted way, Oved hangs up with a clash which sends small reverberations through her head, momentarily making her dizzy. It is not fair. It is not fair that she should have a supervisor like this. Most of the supervisors at the welfare center are women in their fifties who are overweight and need heavy glasses to read the case records but it would be her luck — and with all the responsibilities she has — that she would come up with an Oved. Still, there is nothing to be done. It is part of the burden of the job; she knew, at the beginning, that nothing would be easy.
    She replaces the phone, falls back on the bed and begins absently to read the
Saturday Review of Literature
again but it is difficult, with all the tragedy she has seen, to take any of its empty liberalism seriously and so after a time she drops it across her lap, looks up at the ceiling, begins idly to inspect her apartment. It is not a very nice apartment, only a studio on a bad block off Atlantic Avenue, but then she arrived in Brooklyn to take the job at the department with very little money and highly disorganized and possibly this is the best she could have gotten; she has no fair complaint. The rent is only eighty-three dollars including the utilities which means that she has sixty-two dollars of her weekly salary to carry herself on and even with the twenty a week which she is sending back to her parents in Chicago (her father has quit his job as a bookbinder to look for a “more meaningful set of opportunities in the interpersonal structure” and in the meantime has run out his unemployment benefits) she has enough to live adequately, certainly far more than she would have if she were paying some of the rents she hears about. Even the welfare clients, most of them, are paying more than eighty-three dollars a month and that for living in dreadful, rotting tenements in the heart of the subculture; she should be grateful. She should, in fact, be grateful for everything: she has enough money, she has her health and she has a job through which she can make her life meaningful. How many others have that at twenty-three? Sometimes she thinks of some of the girls with whom she went to Beloit University and shudders for their deprivation, their ignorance, their lost possibilities, trapped into pointless marriages and irrelevant pregnancies … while she, Elizabeth Moore, is in the center of the urban dilemma, free to deal, if she will, with the world.
    “I’m grateful,” Elizabeth says quietly, as she has often said before; the habit of talking to oneself is a harmless piece of projection which she knows in her own case to be not at all schizoid, “I’m fortunate. I have a chance. I can
do
something,” although what she has to do seems, as always, a little beyond her. Nevertheless, she succumbs to a moment of euphoria: things are not all that bad and if nothing else she has shown Schnitzler that ritual in itself is not the sufficient compensation for guilt. The phone rings. She knows it is Oved again. She will be firm and reasonable, quiet and contained. Above all, she will deal with him.
    “Hello?” she says and then decides to be professional. “This is Elizabeth Moore.”
    “Hello there, Miss Moore,” a voice drawls, “I did get your number you see? How you doing?”
    “I don’t know,” she says. “Who is this?” although she knows already; it must be one of her clients. Sooner or later they would break through the cycle of resistance, attempt to call her at home. She is establishing a relationship. “Who did you say this was?” she continues when there is momentarily no answer.
    “Well I thought you would knew. Would know, I mean. This is Willie Wallace Buckingham.”
    “Oh,” she says, “Willie. How are you?”
    “Well, I’m pretty fine, Miss Moore. I am pretty good, all things considered. I was just sitting in this old telephone booth down the corner because relief