A totally liberated woman, thought Mrs. Keppler, does not collect casserole recipes, buy furniture with an eye toward how it'll fit into a larger apartment 'someday' nor after only a year on her own begin every other sentence with 'David says…'

Mrs. Keppler was quite confident that she'd dance at her daughter's wedding yet.

As she cleared the last dishes from the table and blew out the candles. Sandy glanced over at David, who was correcting a batch of themes from one of Professor Simpson's classes. He lounged on her blue couch, his glasses riding precariously down on the end of his nose, one foot propped on an old brass and wood trunk she'd bought at a thrift shop, and which served as both coffee table and linen closet.

He looked very domestic, and while washing up their few dishes, Sandy briefly considered mentioning that tonight's spaghetti dinner had cost less than fifty cents a serving. Not that it would change his mind. No more than would the argument that he should go ahead and move in with her since he spent more time here than in his own apartment and could be saving that two hundred and fifty in rent. Maintaining certain appearances was part of David's old-fashioned code of morality, though he was modern enough in other ways, she reminded herself with a satisfied grin.

The object of her thoughts suddenly exploded in outraged sensibilities.

"Listen to this!" he commanded, pushing his glasses back up where they belonged.

"'The ancient Romans were really hip to all kinds of modern jazz. Like their houses had central heat, hot and cold running water, and you could flush the johns, and since they dug being clean so much, they had great big public bathrooms where everybody grooved together a couple of times a day.'"

"Well, didn't they?" Sandy teased. She put the last plate in the drainer, dried her hands and came in to join him on the blue couch.

"Technically, yes. At least the wealthiest classes had all that; but this jive-talking illiterate makes it sound as if everyone had oil furnaces in the basement and electric water heaters on every floor. And the Romans didn't bathe every day just because they 'dug being clean so much'!"

He scrawled a bitter comment across the top of the unfortunate theme and added a grade: C for facts; F- minus for composition. "And how the hell he ever passed English 1.1 is beyond me," he muttered. From the lofty height of his twenty-four years came fretful predictions for the imminent demise of education.

Sandy knelt beside him and gently smoothed his hair as he picked up another paper and began to read.

"Sensuous old Romans," she murmured. "All that bathing just for the fun of it."

Her fingers moved down to the nape of his neck and hesitated provocatively. David Wade's breathing quickened, but he kept his eyes firmly fixed on the papers before him.

She leaned away then and casually twisted her long golden hair into an enchanting topknot. "As long as you're working, I think I'll go take a shower myself."

Her tone was innocent, but her dimples beguiled as she loosened the top button of her blouse. David abandoned his papers and pulled her down to him. She laughed, pretended to pull away; yet all her struggles only seemed to twist her into more kissable positions. Somehow in the next few minutes his glasses became entangled in her hair, but neither noticed.

"Want me to soap your back?" he murmured, nibbling a dainty pink ear.

"What about those themes? What'll you tell Professor Simpson tomorrow?"

"The truth," he grinned, feeling a joyous virility rising within. "'The woman tempted me, and the fruit I did eat thereof-or however that quotation goes!"

As the subway roared away from Franklin Avenue, Harley Harris roused himself enough to wonder which Seventh Avenue express he was on. The evening rush hour was long past, and he nearly had the car to himself, but he'd been riding and changing trains so aimlessly these last few hours that he'd lost track. Flatbush or New Lots, which was it? The interior sign by the door was broken. Jammed permanently at Pelham Bay. No help there.

The door at the end of the car opened, and an emaciated drunk weaved through. Swaying with the motion of the train, he steadied himself on the pole beside Harley, and a fetid smell of cheap wine and urine settled around them. The drunk wore a dingy overcoat three sizes too large, baggy green pants and brand-new black-and-white sneakers. His gray crew cut was a month late for the barber's chair, and he did not appear to have a shirt or teeth.

"Gimme a dollar," he told Harley.

The boy slid down to the end of the empty bench. The drunk followed, stumbling from one overhead strap to another till he dangled in front of Harley again. "Gimme a dollar," he repeated.

Harley Harris stared straight ahead, ignoring him.

"How 'bout a quarter, then?" asked the drunk.

"Leave me alone!" Harley said shrilly.

The drunk lost his handhold and half lurched, half fell the length of the car, fetching up by a pair of well-dressed matrons who appeared to be coming home from an afternoon of shopping followed by dinner out. One carried a dress box from Lane Bryant, the other a smaller Saks box. Both regarded the unshaven, ill-smelling derelict with distinct disapproval.

"Gimme a dollar," Harley heard him say.

"Go to hell," advised the first matron.

The second followed with an explicit but anatomically impossible suggestion. Shocked, the drunk retreated to a corner seat, muttering to himself.

Harley looked at his watch. Almost ten. He'd had nothing to eat since a hot dog and bagel at Grand Central his third or fourth time through. When had that been? Two o'clock? Three? And there was his old man expecting him at three to help lay out the summer display windows for the Susie-Lynne stores. He'd probably be standing on his head by now.

Every time he thought about what he'd done, Harley Harris felt queasy. Nauman had it coming to him, he told himself; but the anger that had fueled him earlier had dissipated, and now he was wondering if maybe he'd acted too hastily. Too drastically. If only he'd waited and made Nauman talk to him, artist to artist.

That's what his old man was always saying: "Harley, you don't think what you're doing till you've done it."

The train slowed down, stopped, and the two matrons got off.

"They weren't no ladies," the drunk confided to the car at large, but Harley Harris was twisting to look for signs.

Kingston. Good, he was on the New Lots train after all. Home was only five minutes away, and dinner would have been saved for him. Suddenly he felt like a small boy again. Mom would cry and smear her glasses; the old man would storm and rage, but Harley was too tired to care anymore.

I'll tell Pop, he thought, Pop'll figure out what I should do.

All his life Pop had told him what to do. Post-graduate work had been his first rebellion; and now his heart sank even lower, knowing what his stern father would probably make him do.