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crewcut hair; the stiff bristles reminded her of a toothbrush. And Bill fitted perfectly into his narrow-shouldered ivy-league coat ... he had virtually no shoulders. The only sport he played was tennis, and that really aroused her animosity. A man wearing white shorts, bobby socks, tennis shoes! A college student at best... as Bill had been when she met him.
    "Don’t you get lonely?" she asked Ragle.
    "Eh?"
    "Not being married." Most of the kids she had known in high school were now married, all but the impossible ones. "I mean, it’s fine your living with your sister and brother-in-law, but wouldn’t you like to have a little home of your own for you and your wife?" She put the emphasis on wife.
    Considering, Ragle said, "Ultimately I’ll do that. But the truth of the matter is I’m a bum."
    "A bum," she echoed, thinking of all the money he had won in the contest. Heaven knew how much it added up to in all.
    "I don’t like a permanent thing," he explained. "Probably I picked up a nomadic outlook in the war ... and before that, my family moved around a lot. My father and mother were divorced. There’s a real resistance in my personality toward settling down... being defined in terms of one house, one wife, one family of kids. Slippers and pipe."
    "What’s wrong with that? It means security."
    Ragle said, "But I’d get doubts." Presently he said, "I did get doubts. When I was married before."
    "Oh," she said, interested. "When was that?"
    "Years ago. Before the war. When I was in my early twenties. I met a girl; she was a secretary for a trucking firm. Very nice girl. Polish parents. Very bright, alert girl. Too ambitious for me. She wanted nothing but to get up in the class where she’d be giving garden parties. Barbecues in the patio."
    "I don’t see anything wrong with that," Junie said. "It’s natural to want to live graciously." She had got that term out of Better Homes and Gardens, one of the magazines she and Bill subscribed to.
    "Well, I told you I was a bum," Ragle grunted, and dropped the subject.
    The ground had become hilly, and they had to climb. Here, the houses had larger lawns, terraces of flowers; fat imposing mansions, the homes of the well-to-do. The streets were irregular. Thick groves of trees appeared. And above them they could see the woods itself, beyond the final street, Olympus Drive.
    "I wouldn’t mind living up here," Junie said. Better, she thought, than those one-story tract houses with no foundations. That lose their roofs on the first windy day. That if you leave the hose running all night the water fills up the garage.
    Among the clouds in the sky a rapidly moving glittery dot shot by and was gone. Moments later she and Ragle heard the faint, almost absurdly remote roar.
    "A jet," she said.
    Scowling upward, Ragle shaded his eyes and peered at the sky, not walking but standing in the middle of the sidewalk with his feet planted apart.
    "You think it’s perhaps a Russian jet?" she asked mischievously.
    Ragle said, "I wish I knew what went on up there."
    "You mean what God is doing?"
    "No," he said. "Not God at all. I mean that stuff that floats by every now and then."
    Junie said, "Vic was talking last night about groping around for the light cord in the bathroom; you remember?"
    "Yes," he said, as they trudged on uphill once more.
    "I got to thinking. That never happened to me."
    "Good," Ragle said.
    "Except I did remember one thing like that. One day I was out on the sidewalk, sweeping. I heard the phone ring inside the house. This was about a year ago. Anyhow, I had been expecting a real important call." It had been from a young man whom she had known in school, but she did not include that detail. "Well, I dropped the broom and I ran in. You know, we have two steps up to the porch?"
    "Yes," he said, paying attention to her.
    "I ran up. And I ran up three. I mean, I thought there was one more. No, I didn’t think there was in so many words. I didn’t mentally say, I have to