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because Richard had thought all the difficulties had been gotten over. It was painful enough to make her weep, and Richard had been very apologetic and had said she made him feel like a brute. And then she had protested that he wasn’t. She knew very well that he wasn’t, that he was angelic compared to what Angelo Rossi would have been, for instance, if she had slept with him the night he stood here on the same steps, asking the same question.
    “Terry, darling—”
    “No,” Therese said, finding her voice at last. “I just can’t tonight, and I can’t go to Europe with you either,” she finished with an abject and hopeless frankness.
    Richard’s lips parted in a stunned way. Therese could not bear to look at the frown above them. “Why not?”
    “Because. Because I can’t,” she said, every word agony. “Because I don’t want to sleep with you.”
    “Oh, Terry!” Richard laughed. “I’m sorry I asked you. Forget about it, honey, will you? And in Europe, too?”
    Therese looked away, noticed Orion again, tipped at a slightly different angle, and looked back at Richard. But I can’t, she thought. I’ve got to think about it sometime, because you think about it. It seemed to her that she spoke the words and that they were solid as blocks of wood in the air between them, even though she heard nothing. She had said the words before to him, in her room upstairs, once in Prospect Park when she was winding a kite string. But he wouldn’t consider them, and what could she do now, repeat them? “Do you want to come up for a while anyway?” she asked, tortured by herself, by a shame she could not really account for.
    “No,” Richard said with a soft laugh that shamed her all the more for its tolerance and its understanding. “No, I’ll go on. Good night, honey. I love you, Terry.” And with a last look at her, he went.

CHAPTER 6
    THERESE STEPPED out into the street and looked, but the streets were empty with a Sunday morning emptiness. The wind flung itself around the tall cement corner of Frankenberg’s as if it were furious at finding no human figure there to oppose. No one but her, Therese thought, and grinned suddenly at herself. She might have thought of a more pleasant place to meet than this. The wind was like ice against her teeth. Carol was a quarter of an hour late. If she didn’t come, she would probably keep on waiting, all day and into the night. One figure came out of the subway’s pit, a splintery thin hurrying figure of a woman in a long black coat under which her feet moved as fast as if four feet were rotating on a wheel.
    Then Therese turned around and saw Carol in a car drawn up by the curb across the street. Therese walked toward her.
    “Hi!” Carol called, and leaned over to open the door for her.
    “Hello. I thought you weren’t coming.”
    “Awfully sorry I’m late. Are you freezing?”
    “No.” Therese got in and pulled the door shut. The car was warm inside, a long dark-green car with dark-green leather upholstery. Carol drove slowly west.
    “Shall we go out to the house? Where would you like to go?”
    “It doesn’t matter,” Therese said. She could see freckles along the bridge of Carol’s nose. Her short fair hair that made Therese think of perfume held to a light was tied back with the green and gold scarf that circled her head like a band.
    “Let’s go out to the house. It’s pretty out there.”
    They drove uptown. It was like riding inside a rolling mountain that could sweep anything before it, yet was absolutely obedient to Carol.
    “Do you like driving?” Carol asked without looking at her. She had a cigarette in her mouth. She drove with her hands resting lightly on the wheel, as if it were nothing to her, as if she sat relaxed in a chair somewhere, smoking. “Why’re you so quiet?”
    They roared into the Lincoln Tunnel. A wild, inexplicable excitement mounted in Therese as she stared through the windshield. She wished the tunnel might cave in