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youngness. The earth in which the foundations were imbedded, of course, had its own age: girl-woman; the same qualities made for a delicate strength. He thought of telling her how he had thought about it, but for some reason did not….
    As the house progressed and grew, Lang ate and slept better and better. The trouble with Lorraine seemed more and more unreal. When he worked, he was as good a man as anyone. Staying with the Kaufmans, he felt, was the smartest thing he had ever done.
The day on which Elly set out to walk through the museum-like town toward the newly completed house was Saturday, the day on which she habitually took her dreaded piano lesson. Elly woke that morning, as she did every morning, suddenly. To become conscious was always a shock.
    She lay in the hot wash of morning sunlight streaming through the blinds and knew immediately that she was depressed. Having had long experience with early-morning misery, she could tell she was depressed before anything concrete could swim up to consciousness. Then she began to hunt for good, solid reasons with which to dispel the troubled state of mind. She kept her eyes shut. She could hear her mother rattling plates in the kitchen; it was a bright sound, carrying with it the promise of food and hot coffee in the mouth. Steps were paddling to or from the bathroom: Daddy, or—suddenly she remembered—Lang. That would do for a starter. This was a fine thought. Lang was the house on the hill. Then she remembered that she had to modify that phrase after having seen the house grow. It was the house in the hill, built right into the side of the earth. Well, that was just fine with her. “The girl in the house in the hill” tripped through her mind like a nursery rhyme. The girl in the house in the hill. That was to be her, Elly Kaufman.
    “Elly.” It was her mother’s voice. “How about—” The voice stopped suddenly, as if Mrs. Kaufman had remembered the guest in the house.
    “Coming,” the girl in the house in the hill shouted at the very top of her voice, and threw the covers off the bed and onto the floor. The depressed state of mind was staved off, and she felt as she always did at such times, that it would never return.
    She hopped out of bed, still keeping her eyes tightly shut. It was a game she played sometimes to reacquaint herself with her world, the world being now this, her room, at other times the bathroom (which had the added thrill of danger since there was always the possibility of a razor blade carelessly left lying about, as her exploring hand swept the cold marble sink), at other times her parents’ room when they weren’t at home. It was always played in the morning, as the world was too familiar at any other time.
    Deliberately depriving herself of the sense of sight, she ran her hand across the table next to her bed, over the rough binding of the book, the texture of which set her teeth on edge so that she moved on quickly to the smoothness of the lamp, and then stepping with unaccustomedly short paces she moved her bare toes over the brassiere lying on the floor just where she remembered having flung it the night before. So far so good. The room was beginning to take on its familiar configurations. But she had forgotten about the pile of music she had been going through the night before, looking for an easy piece to take with her in case she decided not to lie to Mr. Larkin about having to go to the dentist but instead take her lesson. She took a step forward too quickly and stubbed her big toe on the hard binding of “The Well-Tempered Clavier” by Johann Sebastian Bach. She sat down swiftly on the floor and, seizing her toe in her hand, massaged it furiously.
    She began to feel depressed again, instantly. She decided at that moment that she would not attend her piano lesson. She was a little relieved then, and lying back on the tufted rug she closed her eyes as tightly as she could, then opened them suddenly. The effect was dazzling