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like a stupid cow?"
    "Why are you blaming Daddy?" Maggie said angrily. "It's Kate's fault that..."
    Lee felt the fight fizzle out of her. She had forgotten about Kate. Deliberately. She didn't want to think about Kate at all.
    "Well, you don't want to marry that... that lump, do you?" she said, knowing the futility of arguing, but unable to stop.
    Maggie looked at her steadily for a long moment. Then she glanced away. "I don't suppose it makes much difference."
    Lee raised her hands in impotent fury. "I could shake you."
    "It would be just like you," Maggie said. When she looked up, she was smiling.

CHAPTER FOUR
    All the way back to the city, Andrew blessed her with a steady stream of advice from the back seat. About her driving sometimes. Sometimes about her new job, her new responsibilities. Once, about finding herself a new secretary on the sprawling family tree. Lee let him babble, too engrossed with her own rage, with Maggie's quiet misery beside her, to interrupt the nervous jabbering. The smell of Andrew's guilty conscience reeked hotly through the perfumed words.
    Yet Lee knew that she could not look to Andrew for help. He had never in his life done anything against Kate's will. And it was Kate's will that Maggie marry the family's one available male and that she bear him a son.
    Nor would Maggie fight on her own behalf. Not out of fear of Kate so much, but out of a blind, stupid loyalty to Andrew. As she glanced at the girl, Lee knew without asking the unhappiness in Maggie's soul. The discontent. She wanted to reach out and touch her, to tell her that somehow, some way...
    In her frustration, Lee gripped the wheel till her knuckles ached. It was not so and she knew that it was not. For she was as impotent as Maggie, as afraid as Andrew. She could not go to Kate and look her in the eye and tell her to go to hell. She could not... and would not... do anything. Except lose Maggie.
    She turned off the East River Drive at Seventy-third Street and into the clog of crosstown traffic. The tail end of a warm sun painted the streets with shadows and the promise of more sun tomorrow. Tonight it really felt like spring—like a time for being outside, for walking in the early darkness, for holding hands. It was not a night for being morbid, for slumping down into one's misery and telling the world to just go away.
    Yet somehow, Lee could not shake off the doldrums and she leaned against the car door, staring sourly at a fat woman crossing against the light.
    "Are you going out tonight?" Maggie said in a tiny voice.
    Maggie's last words had been a good-bye to Miss Ida Winkle, and her voice sounded cracked now and dry, as though her throat had gone rusty. Lee peered at her for a moment, hearing more the tone than the words. She knew that Maggie was not feeling sorry for herself... it wouldn't be like Maggie. But the girl was damned sorry about something.
    "Why?" Lee said at last. "Did you have something in mind?"
    Maggie shook her head.
    "Well, I have a sort of date," Lee said reluctantly. "But I could forget it, if you want company."
    "No, you go," Maggie said too quickly. "I'll make Daddy take me to a movie."
    Lee peered curiously at the girl, unable to catch the nuance of meaning behind her words. Instinctively she knew that Maggie had no intention of going to a movie with Andrew, and yet she knew, too, that Maggie did not want her to stay home.
    Behind them, a horn blared angrily. Lee shifted her attention back to the wheel unwillingly. She had thought that she understood Maggie pretty well. Now, nothing the girl did made any sense.
    But she refused to quibble. If Maggie wanted to get rid of her for the night, then she would make herself scarce. Probably the best thing for both of them—certainly for herself. Give her a chance to think, to figure, without having to look at Maggie. To want to touch her, to tell her...
    She dropped them at the corner of Sixty-eighth Street and continued downtown and then across. On any other