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Clarice said, raising her hands in mock surrender. “I’m a pacifist.”
    A shadow crossed Peter’s face—guilt, Whitney felt certain, about the exit from danger that Charles had secured for him. Perhaps noting this, Charles told Whitney, “If it helps, I’ve told Nixon he should abolish the draft. Then all these ‘idealists’ who protest the war would return to their normal lives, leaving the fighting to volunteers.”
    To the least fortunate
, Whitney wanted to retort,
and for what?
The photo of the Vietnamese president’s brother-in-law shooting a Viet Cong prisoner in the temple had jarred her deeply, and the weekly body count of enemy dead on the evening news suggested to Whitney that in only a year we had dispatched an entire country. “I don’t understand all this,” Janine was telling her. “We’re a business family, after all—we owe our existence to our grandfather’s firm, that Dad made even better. I don’t think any of us want that taken away.”
    By whom?
Whitney wondered. Janine was glib, but her intellect brittle—she knew just enough about current events to slide through at a cocktail party. But she avoided serious discussion, often through strenuous, if supposedly charming, efforts to divert the conversation to herself. At bottom her political and social views were what she imagined Charles’s to be. What else could a girl do, Whitney thought acidly, when her father’s sizeable donation had slipped her into Vassar, commencing an education to which she had remained largely inured.
    By contrast, Whitney deeply valued her four years at Wheaton. Granted, applying had been a last stab at pleasing her mother, a devoted alumna, who adored her time there and relived it through frequent reunions with classmates. But Whitney was also drawn by its pristinely New England campus, the oaks and evergreens amidst rolling lawns and red brick buildings with white pillars, the deeper sense that this was a place dedicated to educating bright young women barred from attending the all-male bastions of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Dartmouth. Her first day had been somewhat disheartening: she and the other new girls wore white dresses to a convocation where Wheaton’s president, a bow-tied patrician named William Courtney Hamilton Prentice IV, told them that Wheaton’s purpose was to educate prospective mothers, the better to raise the next generation of children. No feminist, during the holidays President Prentice sat atop a platform in the gym as he read “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” to girls in robes and pajamas. But the professors were there to encourage these women to grow. Free from the scrutiny of males, Whitney had begun to think for herself. Out in the world women faced barriers, everyone knew, but the boldest believed they could, in the words of her friend Payton Clarke, be “more than the charm on the arm,” a decorative helpmate. Whitney too had glimmers of a different life, encouraged by a creative writing professor who suggested that she should keep on writing short stories. Though Whitney could not quite believe it, she cherished the compliment.
    “A business family?” she inquired of her sister. “What does that mean, exactly? I don’t remember Mom and Dad issuing me a briefcase with my diapers.”
    Janine waved a hand. “You know very well what I mean.”
    But do you?
Whitney wanted to ask. Janine’s fix on the world changed from moment to moment, her account of the same people and situations oscillating wildly, depending on what she wished reality to be, or how she wished others—especially Anne—to see her. It was tiresome, Whitney thought, before catching herself. It was bad enough to disagree with her father, worse to spoil this dinner by exposing her sister’s shallowness of thought. Already, Peter was fidgeting with his dessert fork.
    “Janine’s right,” she told her father equably. “There ought to be some good in being older, including the graceful silence of a