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medal was not found. It was thought the medal had become detached in some manner from his shirt; but although the bottom was searched at that place, the medal had not been located.”
    Christine went to her own apartment immediately. She hoped her child had neither seen the boy brought to shore, nor had watched the efforts of the guards to revive him. If the child were frightened or upset emotionally, she wanted to be there at the door to comfort her. Rhoda was not a sensitive child—certainly, she was not an imaginative one—but the inevitableness of death, she felt, if knowledge came too suddenly, without a proper preparation, could make an impression on even the calmest person; but when Rhoda came in at length, she was as placid, as unruffled, as she had been that morning. She entered so coolly, she asked for a glass of milk and a peanut-butter sandwich with such unconcern, that her mother wondered if she fully understood what had happened. She asked the question in her gentle, serene voice, and Rhoda said yes, she knew all about it, in fact, it was she who suggested that the guards look among the pilings. She had been present when the body was taken from the water; she had seen it laid out on the lawn.
    Christine put her arms about the stolid child, and said, “You must try to get these pictures out of your mind. I don’t want you to be frightened or bothered at all. These things happen, and we accept them.”
    Rhoda, enduring her mother’s embrace, said in a surprised voice that she wasn’t disturbed in the least. She had found the discovery exciting, and the efforts at resuscitation, since she’d never seen such a thing before, had interested her greatly. Christine thought:
She’s so cool, so impersonal about things that bother others.
It was the thing she’d never been able to understand; it was the thing she and Kenneth had once smiled about and called “the Rhoda reaction” between themselves; but this time she feltuneasiness, a depression she could neither define nor fit into any pattern of reality that she knew.
    Rhoda pulled away from her mother. She went into her room and began working on her jigsaw puzzle. Later Christine came into the room and put the sandwich and milk on the table. Her face was still puzzled, her brows puckered a little. She said, “Just the same, it was an unfortunate thing to see and remember.” She kissed the child on the top of her head, and continued. “I understand how you really feel, my darling.”
    Rhoda moved a bit of her puzzle into its proper place on the board; then, looking up, she said in a surprised voice, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mother. I don’t feel any way at all.”
    Christine sighed and went back to the living-room. She tried to read, but she could not concentrate; then Rhoda, as though feeling, if dimly, that she had somehow erred, had done something which, though incomprehensible to her, had strongly displeased her mother, abandoned her puzzle, and approaching the chair where Christine was sitting, she smiled her charming, hesitant smile, her single dimple appearing suddenly. She rubbed her cheek against her mother’s in a calculated simulation of affection, laughed coquettishly, and moved away.
    She’s done something naughty,
thought Christine;
something very naughty indeed to make her go to such trouble to please me.
    It seemed to her then that her child, as though sensing for the first time that some factor of body or spirit separated her from those around her, tried to conceal the difference by aping the values of others; but since there was nothing spontaneous in her heart to instruct her, she must, instead, consider, debate, experiment, and feel her way cautiously through the values and minds of her models.
    She approached her mother once more, made an eager sound with her mouth, and kissed Christine on the lips, a thing she hadnot voluntarily done for a long time. Then, her eyes narrowed, her head thrown back as though for a