Victorian era, who could talk charmingly and vivaciously and at considerable length without saying anything. It was pleasant merely to sit and sip and let the words flow over him.

She looked remarkably well, he thought, for a woman who was to die within a year of galloping cancer. She seemed to have recovered entirely from the emotional aftermath of his father's death. So much so that he found himself wondering how deeply she had loved the man with whom she had spent some thirty-eight years of her life.

She was slim and quick and sure in her movements and her figure, of which she was inordinately proud, resembled that of a girl rather than the body of a woman nibbling late middle-age. Slowly he realized she had stopped talking, had asked him a question and was awaiting his answer. He smiled apologetically and said, "Sorry, mother, I must have been wool-gathering."

"You're tired, lamb." No one had called him that in twenty years. "And no wonder, with all that running around for Mr. Simms on the newspaper."

Mr. Simms—that would be Patrick "Paddy" Simms, his managing editor, the old-school city-room tyrant who had taught him his job so well that he had gone on to make a successful career of public relations and the organization of facts into words—at rates far more imposing than those paid a junior reporter during the Great Depression.

In his swell of memories Coulter almost lost his mother's question a second time, barely managed to catch its meaning. He sipped his drink and said, "I agree, mother, the burning of the books in Germany is a threat to freedom. But I don't think you'll have to worry about Adolph Hitler very long."

She misread his meaning, of course, frowned charmingly and said, "I do hope you're right, Banny. Nellie Maynard had a few of us for tea this afternoon and Margot Henson, she's tremendously chic and her husband knows all those big men in the New Deal in Washington—not that he agrees with them, thank goodness—well, she says the big men in the State Department are really worried about Hitler. They think he may try to make Germany strong enough to start another war."

"It could happen, of course," Coulter told her. He had forgotten his mother's trick of stressing one syllable of a word. Funny, Connie, his wife—if she was still his wife after whatever had happened—had the same trick. With an upper-class Manhattan dry soda-cracker drawl added.

He wondered if he were going to have to live through it all again—the NRA, the Roosevelt boomlet, the Recession, the string of Hitler triumphs in Europe, the war, Pearl Harbor and all that followed—Truman, the Cold War, Korea, McCarthy ...

Seated across from her at the gleaming Sheraton dining table, which should by rights be in his own dining room in Scarborough overlooking the majestic Hudson, he wondered how he could put his foreknowledge to use. There was the market, of course. And he could recall the upset football win of Yale over Princeton in 1934, the Notre Dame last-minute triumph over Ohio State a year later, most of the World Series winners. On the Derby winners he was lost....

When the meal was over and they were returning to the library with its snug insulating bookshelves and warm cannel-coal fire, his mother said, "Banny, it's been so nice having this talk with you. We haven't had many lately. I wish you'd stay home tonight with me. You really do look tired, you know."

"Sorry, mother," he replied. "I've got a date."

"With the Lawton girl, I suppose," she said without affection. Then, accepting a cigarette and holding it before lighting it, "I do wish you wouldn't see quite so much of her. I'll admit she's a perfectly nice girl, of course. But she is strange and people are beginning to talk. I hope you're not going to be foolish about her."

"Don't worry," Coulter replied. Since when, he wondered, had wanting a girl as he wanted Eve Lawton been foolish. He added, "What's wrong with Eve anyway?"

His mother lit a cigarette. "Lamb, it's not that there's anything really wrong with Eve. As a matter of fact I believe her family is quite distinguished—good old Lincolnville stock."

"I'm aware of that," he replied drily. "I believe her great, great, great grandfather was a brigadier while mine was only a colonel in the Revolution."

His mother dismissed the distant past with a gesture. "But the Lawtons haven't managed to keep up," she stated. "Think of your schooling, dear—you've had the very best. While Eve ..." With a shrug.

"Went to grammar and high-school right here in Lincolnville," Coulter finished for her. "Mother, Eve has more brains and character than any of the debs I know." Then, collecting himself, "But don't worry, mother—I'm not going to let it upset my life."

"I'm very glad to hear it," Mrs. Coulter said simply. "Remember, Banny, you and your Eve are a world apart. Besides, we're going to take a trip abroad this summer. There's so much I want us to see together. It would be a shame to ..." She let it hang.

Coulter looked at his mother, remembering hard. He had been able to stymie that trip on the excuse that he'd almost certainly lose his job and that new jobs were too hard to get in a depression era. He thought that his surviving parent was, beneath her well-mannered surface, a shallow, domineering, snobbish empress. Granted his new vista of vision, he realized for the first time how she had dominated both his father and himself.

He thought, I hate this woman. No, not hate, just loathe.

He glanced at the watch on his wrist, a Waltham he had long since lost or broken or given away—he couldn't recall which. He said, "All the same, mother, a date's a date. I'm a little late now. Don't wait up for me."

"I shan't," she replied, looking after him with a frown of pale concern as he headed for the hall closet.

It took a few minutes to get the Pontiac warmed up but once out of the driveway Coulter knew the way to Eve Lawton's house as if he had been there last night, not two decades earlier. The small cold winter moon cast its frigid light over an intimate little group of apple tapioca clouds and made the snow-clad fields a dark grey beneath the black evergreens that backed the fields beside the road.

As he slowed to a stop in front of the old white-frame house with its graceful utilitarian lines of roof and gable, he found himself wondering whether this were the dream or the other—the twenty years that had found him an orphan. That had given him enough inherited money to strike out for himself in New York. That had seen him win success as a highly-paid publicist. That had seen him married to wealthy Connie Marlin and a way of life as far from that of Lincolnville as he himself now was from Scarborough and Connie.

Eve opened the door before he reached it. She was as willowy and alive as he remembered her, and a great deal more vital and beautiful. She put up her face to be kissed as soon as he was inside and his arms went around her soft angora sweater and he wondered a little at what he had so cavalierly dismissed and left behind him.

She said, "You're late, Banning. I thought you'd forgotten."

He kept one arm around her as they walked into the living room with its blazing fire. He said, "Sorry. Mother wanted to talk."

"Is she terribly worried about me?" Eve asked. Her face, in inquiry, was like a half-opened rose.

Coulter hesitated, then replied, "I think so, darling. She was afraid your stock had gone to seed. I had to remind her that your great, great, great grandfather outranked mine."

The odd, in her case beautiful, blankness of fear smoothed Eve's forehead. She said, her voice low, her eyes not meeting his, "Yesterday you'd never have noticed what she was thinking."

"Yesterday?" He forced her to look at