"You played very well, I thought," Strand said.

"I kept my end up, that's about all. The day I know I can't I'll donate my racquet to the Smithsonian Institution. Four, five years..." His voice trailed off, the onset of age in its tone. He was still sweating and he mopped at his face with the towel. "Those young men," he said, "are a little old for your daughter. At this season the boys her age are away in school or college and can't make it for the weekends. That fellow she's playing with now is twenty-four. He's in his father's firm in Wall Street, seems to take all the time off he wants. Very sure of himself with the ladies." Hazen glanced significantly at Strand. "Single and otherwise."

"He seemed gentlemanly enough to me."

Hazen laughed. "I wasn't suggesting that he goes around raping children. I just thought it might be a good idea to inform Caroline that he's much older than she. If you don't mind my saying so, she seems to have led a most sheltered life until now. Not like the run of young girls I see at the parties around here in the summertime, at all. You know, rich children of split homes, parents given to drink and promiscuity...well..."

"Her mother is very protective," Strand said, annoyed at the implicit warning. "The baby of the family and all that." Then he felt that he sounded as though he was blaming Leslie and added, hastily, "I'm sure Caroline knows how to take care of herself."

"It would be a pity if she didn't," Hazen said gravely. "She has the quality of innocence. It's too rare to be jeopardized. As for her tennis..." Hazen shrugged. "She has a surprisingly accurate notion about how good she really is."

"Not good enough," Strand said. "She told me she'd told you."

Hazen smiled. "For one so young to say something like that is rare, too. Has she ever said anything to you about what she wants to do after she finishes her schooling?"

"Not really," Strand said. "I guess she's like most young people her age these days who have no special talents-waiting to see what turns up."

"Didn't she tell you that she wants to go to an agricultural college out west?"

"Agricultural...?" Strand repeated incredulously. Why in the name of God would she want to hide something like that from him? "This is the first I've heard of it. Why? Did she tell you?"

Hazen shook his head. "She just said she wanted to go someplace where life was simpler and she wasn't surrounded by concrete."

"It's true City College isn't surrounded by prairie," Strand said. "But it's a good enough school and it's cheap and she'd be living at home." He resolved to question his daughter when they were alone together.

"The money mightn't be all that much of a problem," Hazen said. "There's always the possibility of a scholarship."

"Not with her marks. Eleanor got one, but Caroline's no scholar, even if it's a father who says so."

"She told me something else that might be useful," Hazen said. "They're giving more and more athletic scholarships to women these days, and..."

"Her tennis may be all right for Central Park, but she knows herself she'd never get anywhere with it..."

"Not her tennis," Hazen said. "I agree with you. But I noticed how quick she is. She runs extraordinarily fast. I asked her if she'd ever raced and she said she'd won the hundred yard dash in her school field day last month."

"Yes," Strand said. "I remember. Still-field day at a small private school..."

"I asked her if she'd been timed and it turns out she did the hundred in ten-four. For a girl who's had no training and hasn't been coached that's most impressive. With good coaching she might get close to Olympic time. It's a pity that her school doesn't have any interscholastic program or a lot of good schools would be after her. I know the public relations man for an institution called Truscott College-that's in Arizona, which is west enough for anybody-and I believe if he mentioned that I'd seen a good prospect for their teams my friend could get their physical training department interested. And the school has a strong agricultural section."

"Did you mention any of this to Caroline?" Strand asked worriedly, sensing vast new family complications looming before him.

"No," Hazen said. "I thought it would be wiser to talk to you and her mother before I raised any hopes."

"Thank you," Strand said dryly, annoyed, despite himself, that his daughter had vouchsafed information about herself to an almost complete stranger, information that she had kept hidden from her parents. At home when they had people in, she answered questions in monosyllables and took the first opportunity to go to her room. "I'll have a little talk with that girl."

"Anyway," Hazen said, "I thought you and your wife should at least know what the possibilities are."

"We live in funny times," Strand said, smiling. "When a girl can run herself into an education. Maybe I'll buy a stopwatch and time my pupils instead of annoying them with examinations."

"If you decide you and Caroline want to explore the situation, I'd be glad to call my friend at the college."

"It's very kind of you to offer to help, but I imagine you have enough other things to think about, without worrying about how my daughter can learn to be a farmer three thousand miles away from home."

"I gathered she doesn't intend to go in for farming. She said she'd like to study to be a veterinary after and that would be a proper start."

"Veterinary..." Strand couldn't keep the dismay out of his voice. And he remembered his conversation with Judith Quinlan in which she had said, jokingly, that if she gave up teaching she would be a veterinarian. Was it some new female aberration taking hold suddenly in the heart of the city? "Veterinary," he repeated. "Why, we've never even had a cat or a dog in the house. Did she tell you what gave her that idea?"

"I asked her and she seemed shy-embarrassed, perhaps-about answering," Hazen said. "She just mumbled something about private reasons. So I didn't press her."

"What do you think about the idea?" Strand said, almost aggressively.

Hazen shrugged as they walked along. "I believe in this age it is the fashion to allow young people their own choice of careers. It's as good a policy as any, I suppose. It's my feeling-perhaps an illusion-that I would be a happier man today if my father had not dictated what I was to do with my life. Who knows?" He turned his head and peered curiously, his eyes narrowed, at Strand. "Supposing, all other things being equal, when you were your daughter's age, you could have made a choice-would you have chosen as you did?"

"Well," Strand said uncomfortably, "no. My dream was to be a historian, not to feed a few hand-me-down facts about the past to unruly children. If I could have gone to Harvard or to Oxford, spent a few leisurely years in Europe among the archives and libraries-" He laughed ruefully. "But I had to make a living. It was all I could do to find enough odd jobs to keep me going long enough to get my B.A. at City College. Perhaps if I had been stronger.... Well, I wasn't stronger. Old ambitions." It was his turn to shrug. "I haven't thought about them for years."

"Supposing," Hazen said, "somehow, you had gone to Harvard, had the years in Europe, been able to become the man you had hoped to be, seen your name honored on the shelves of libraries, wouldn't you have been-well"-he searched for the word-"more satisfied, shall we say, than you are now?"

"Perhaps," Strand said. "Perhaps not. We'll never know."

"Do you want me to call the man at Truscott?" Hazen, Strand recognized, was gifted at putting witnesses in a corner, where the answer had to be yes or no.

Strand was silent for a moment, thinking of what the apartment would be like with Caroline gone for months at a time while she was at school, then permanently after that. He and Leslie, too, would then have to face up to the problems of vacant rooms. "I can't give you an answer now," Strand said. "I'll have to talk this over with my wife. Don't think I'm ungrateful for your interest, but..."

"Gratitude has nothing to do with it," Hazen said crisply. "Remember there's a lot I have to be grateful for. It's well within reason to believe that I wouldn't be standing here talking to you today-or anywhere, for that matter-if it hadn't been for Caroline's intervention in the park."

"She didn't even know what she was doing," Strand said. "Ask her. It was just a reflex action on her part."

"And all the more admirable for that," Hazen said. "There's no great rush. Speak to your wife and the girl and let me know what you decide. Lunch is at one. I've invited some friends, among them two men you might be interested in talking to-a history professor from Southampton College and an English instructor."

The perfect host, Strand thought. If his guest were a test pilot Hazen probably would have dug up two other test pilots to compare crashes with at lunch.

As they reached the house Strand saw a tall, very thin boy, standing in the driveway, holding a fielder's glove and a catcher's mitt. "There's the other half of the battery," Hazen said. "Would you mind umpiring?"

"I'll do my best," Strand said.

"Good morning, Ronny," Hazen said. "This is Mr. Strand. He'll call the balls and strikes."

"Good morning, sir." Ronny handed Hazen the catcher's mitt. Hazen punched at the pocket of the mitt as they walked across the driveway to the lawn that bordered it. He put his towel down as home plate and Ronny, his face very serious, paced off to his pitching distance. Hazen crouched behind the towel, bending easily, and Strand took his position behind him, trying not to smile.

"You get five warm-up pitches," Hazen called to the boy, "and then it's play ball. The usual signals, Ronny. One finger for the fast ball. Two for the curve, three for the pitchout."

"Yes, sir," Ronny said. His windup was elaborate, with a succession of little jerking motions and a final turning of his body, so that his back was facing the plate before he turned and threw.

Strand recognized the style from watching the Yankees on television. The boy had obviously been impressed by Luis Tiant, the old Cuban pitcher who had the most spectacular pitching motions in baseball. Once again he had to mask his smile.

The ball came over the towel slowly. Strand guessed that the boy had intended a curve.

After the fifth pitch, Strand called, "Batter up."

"Right in there, baby," Hazen said. "Breeze it past 'em."

Ronny bent over to peer at the sign, very Tiant-like, lifted his left leg and threw.

"Ball one," Strand barked, getting into the spirit of the game Hazen was playing with the boy.

Hazen looked over his shoulder, glowering. "What's the matter, Ump, you blind? Aren't you going to give us the corners?"

"Play ball," Strand said loudly.

Hazen winked broadly and turned back to face the pitcher.

After fifteen minutes in which Strand generously had counted ten strikeouts against four walks, Hazen stood up and went out to Ronny and shook his hand, saying, "Good game, Ronny. In another ten years you'll be ready for the big leagues." He gave his mitt to the boy, who was smiling for the first time, and he and Strand went into the house.

"That was a nice thing to do," Strand said.

"He's a good kid," Hazen said carelessly. "He'll never amount to anything as a ballplayer, though. He's about a half second too slow and he'll never get there. The day he realizes it will be tough for him. I used to love the game and when the day came that I knew, in my bones, that I'd never hit the curve I could've cried. So I turned to hockey. I had the talents." He smiled unpleasantly. "Brutality and cunning. Thanks for the umpiring. See you at lunch. I'm ready for my shower now. You'd be surprised what work it is to bend your knees like that for ten minutes." He went toward his wing of the house.

Strand didn't go up to the bedroom where he supposed his wife was still enjoying the comfort of doing nothing on a Saturday morning. He wasn't ready to talk to Leslie just yet. Instead he went out to the pool where he found Eleanor and Jimmy sunbathing.

Eleanor was stretched out on a mat on her stomach, in a bikini, with Jimmy squatting beside her rubbing lotion on her back. She had undone the straps of her bra so that she wouldn't have any white lines across her eventual tan and her position, with her breasts almost showing, was, at least for Strand, decidedly erotic. Her body, with its slender waist, swelling haunches and satiny skin, reminded him disturbingly of her mother's, and after a first glance, as he sat down on the edge of a beach chair, Strand kept looking out to sea. Eleanor and Jimmy were playing a word game, one of them giving a letter and the other adding to it with the object of forcing the opponent into the letter that would make a word and thereby losing the point.

"E," said Eleanor. "Hi, Dad. How's Miss Wimbledon 1984 doing out there?"

"Making the boys run," Strand said, wishing she'd tie up her bra.

"V," Jimmy said.

"Obvious, Jimmy," Eleanor said. Then to Strand, "We ought to give the old terror of Central Park a unanimous vote of thanks for all this splendor she's introduced us to. I, Jimmy. I haven't seen our genial host yet. What's he planning for our entertainment?"

"Lunch," Strand said.

"Sorry about that," Eleanor said. "Will you make my excuses? I'm asked out to lunch. Man I happened to meet at Bobby's Bar's coming to pick me up for lunch with the lit'ry set. He writes poetry. For the little magazines. Don't look so aghast, Dad." She laughed. "The poetry's pretty poor but he's got a regular job. I, Jimmy."

"Happened to meet," Jimmy said. "He was waiting for you last night, gasping. C."

"Astute of you, Jimmy." Strand didn't know whether she meant Jimmy was astute for saying C or for realizing that the meeting the night before had been prearranged. She sighed. "You're a clever fellow. I challenge you. What's the word."

"Evict," Jimmy said triumphantly.

"Got me," Eleanor said. "You have a tiresome way with words. He always beats me," she said to her father. "And I'm supposed to be the smart one in the family."

"You're done," Jimmy said, putting the cap on the bottle of lotion. "Want to play some more?"

"Not for the moment," Eleanor said. "The sun stuns me. I'll just bake until my cavalier comes to claim me."

"I'm going to take a few turns in the pool," Jimmy said, standing. He was tall and thin, like his father, with his ribs showing and his big fierce nose jutting below the same beetling full dark eyebrows. Without pleasure, Strand made the comparison between his son and the young men he had just been watching on the tennis court. Where they were lean and long-muscled, Jimmy was plain skinny and didn't look as though he could last even one set on the courts. Jimmy professed to find all forms of exercise sweaty and life-shortening. When he was teased by Caroline about his sedentary ways, he quoted Kipling's jibe about the gentleman athletes of Britain-"flannelled fools at the wicket...muddied oafs at the goals." At least there was no danger, Strand thought, that Hazen would attempt to send Jimmy off to school on an athletic scholarship.

Jimmy dove into the pool with a great splash and happily paddled about in a stroke that Strand would have been hard put to describe.

"Who's the cavalier, as you call him, who's coming to take you to lunch?" Strand asked.

"You don't know him," Eleanor said.

"Is he the one you told me about? The Greek island one?"

Eleanor hesitated for a moment. "The same," she said. "He thought it would be a good idea for us to meet on neutral ground. You don't have to see him if you don't want to."

"Of course I want to," Strand said.

"He's presentable, if you're worried," Eleanor said.

"I wasn't worried about that."

"Good old Dad."

"Do you think it's polite to go off like that without telling Mr. Hazen? After all, you haven't even seen him here yet and you've spent the night in his house."

"It's not my fault he didn't make dinner last night," Eleanor said. She sounded defensive. "Anyway, he's paying his debts to Caroline and you and Mother, and I'm sure that's enough for him."

Debts, Strand thought. An unpleasant way of putting it. "Will you be back for dinner?"

"If you want me to."

"I want you to."

Eleanor sighed. "I'll be back."

"Eleanor," Strand said, wishing she would sit up and tie her bra, "I'd like to ask you a question."

"What is it?" She sounded wary.

"It's about Caroline. Do you think she's old enough to go away to college?"

"I went at her age," Eleanor said. "Anyway, I thought she was going to City. That's not away. It's just uptown."

"Supposing we changed our mind about it?"

"What are you and Mother going to do about her tuition and board and all that? Take on other jobs? I don't think at your age..."

"What if we thought we could manage it?"

"How?"

"Somehow." He was afraid Eleanor would hoot at the idea of Caroline in a track suit.

Finally Eleanor tied the bra straps behind her back and sat up. "If you want the truth," she said, "I think she'd be better off at home. She's younger than I was at her age. By a long shot. For one thing, there never are any boys around the house or calling her on the telephone. Haven't you noticed that?"

"Not really," Strand admitted.