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Meyer Circle, and that afternoon as Mrs. Bridge and Madge Arlen drove up to the house they saw a gang of boys playing football in the street. Apparently Grace Barron was not at home because no one answered the bell; they were about to leave when one of the boys came running up from the street. He stopped and kicked the ball back to the other players, then jumped over a flower bed, and with a whoop and a wave came running straight across the lawn.
    “That must be her son,” Madge Arlen observed.
    “His name will be mud if she catches him leaping over her flowers/* said Mrs. Bridge.
    They waited, a trifle critically, for him to approach. He was wearing a baggy sweatshirt, faded blue jeans, dirty white ten-nis shoes, and a baseball cap. He was a thin, graceful boy, about the same height as Douglas, and as he came nearer they could see that he had freckles and a snub nose. He was laughing and panting for breath.
    “Hello!” he called, and at that moment they realized he was not a boy at all. It was Grace Barron.
    And Mrs. Bridge recalled with equal clarity an evening when she and Grace attended an outdoor symphony. Music was one of the things Mrs. Bridge had always wanted to know more about, and so she was pleased, if startled, when Grace, whom she scarcely knew, simply telephoned one evening and asked if she would like to go to the concert in the park. They sat on folding chairs and listened, and it was like nothing else Mrs. Bridge had ever experienced. When the symphony ended, while the musicians were packing away their instruments and the conductor was autographing programs, Grace suggested they come to the next conceit.
    “I’d love to!” Mrs. Bridge exclaimed- “When is it?” And upon learning the date she said regretfully, “Oh, dear, the Noel Johnsons are having a few people over for cocktails “
    “That’s all right,” Grace interrupted. “I know how it is.”
    And there was an afternoon when they happened to run into each other downtown. Mrs. Bridge was looking over some new ovenware she had heard advertised on the radio. She decided not to buy, and in the course of wandering around the store she suddenly came upon Grace Barron staring fixedly at a gift item an arrangement of tiny silver bells that revolved around an elaborate candlestick.
    “Oh, isn’t this tricky!” Mrs. Bridge said, having a look at the price tag. “But I think they’re asking too much/’
    “I feel like those bells/’ said Grace. “Why are they turning around, India? Why? Because the candle has been lighted. What I want to say is oh, I don’t know. It’s just that the orbit is so small/’ She resumed staring at the contrivance, which went slowly around and around and gave out a faint, exquisite tinkling.

20
What’s Up, Senora Bridge?
    Spanish was a subject she had long meant to study, and quite often she remarked to her friends that she wished she had studied it in school. The children had heard her say this, so for her birthday that year they gave her an album of phonograph records consisting of a lethargic dialogue between Senor Carreno of Madrid and an American visitor named Senora Brown. Along with the records came an attractive booklet of instructions and suggestions. Mrs. Bridge was delighted with the gift and made a joke about how she intended to begin her lessons the first thing “manana.”
    As it turned out, however, she was busy the following day, and the day after because of a PTA meeting at the school, and the day after. Somehow or other more than a month passed before she found time to begin, but there came a morning when she resolved to get at it, and so, after helping Harriet with the breakfast dishes, she found her reading glasses and sat down in the living room with the instruction booklet. The course did not sound at all difficult, and the more pages she read the more engrossing it became. The instructions were clear enough: she was simply to listen to each line of dialogue and then, in the pause that