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licked her spoon on both sides.
    Mrs. Holland’s phrase, the image it evoked, came from the outer circle of experience. Disturbed, the girls moved uneasily in their chairs, feeling that nothing more should be said.
    “Don’t you girls
ever
cry?” said Mrs. Holland, almost with hostility.
    “Never,” said Ruth, settling that.
    “My sister cried,” said May. She turned her light-lashed gaze to Helen and said, “And Helen cries.”
    “I don’t,” said Helen. She drew in, physically, with the first apprehension of being baited. “I do not.”
    “Oh, Helen, you do,” said May. She turned to Ruth for confirmation, but Ruth, indifferent, having spoken for herself, was scooping up the liquid dregs of her ice cream. “Do you want to see Helen cry?” said May. Like Mrs. Holland, she seemed to have accepted the idea that one of them was going to break down and disgrace them; it might as well be Helen. Or perhaps the remark went deeper than that. Mrs. Holland, who could barely follow Ruth’s mental and emotional spirals, felt unable, and disinclined, to cope with this one. May leaned forward, facing Helen. Mrs. Holland suddenly answered “No,” too late, for May was saying, in a pretty, piping voice, “Hey, Helen, listen. The King has left us, and Kipling is dead.”
    Helen failed to reward her. She stared, stolid, as if the words had been in a foreign language. But there remained about the table the knowledge that an attempt had been made, and Mrs. Holland and Helen, both natural victims, could notlook away from May, or at each other. Ruth had finished eating. She sighed, stretched, began to tug on her coat. She said to Mrs. Holland, “Thankyouverymuchforalovelytea. I mean, if our darling new headmistress asks did we thank you, well, we did. I was afraid I might forget to say it later on.”
    “Thanks for a lovely tea,” said May. She had been afraid to speak, in case the effort of forming words should release the tight little knot of tears she felt in her throat. It was so much more difficult to be cruel than to be hurt.
    “Thank you,” said Helen, as if asleep.
    “I can only hope they thanked you,” the headmistress said when Mrs. Holland delivered them, safe, half an hour later. “Girls are apt to forget.”
    “They thanked me,” said Mrs. Holland. The three girls had curtsied, muttering some final ritual phrase, and vanished into an area of dim, shrill sound.
    “Study hall,” said the headmistress. “Their studies are over for the term, but they respect the discipline.”
    “Yes, I suppose they do.”
    “It was kind of you to take them out,” said the headmistress. She laid her cold pink hand on Mrs. Holland’s for a moment, then withdrew it, perplexed by the wince, the recoil. “One forgets how much it can mean at that age, a treat on a rainy day.”
    “Perhaps that’s the answer,” Mrs. Holland said.
    The headmistress sensed that things were out of hand, but she had no desire to be involved; perhaps the three had been noisy, had overeaten. She smiled with such vague good manners that Mrs. Holland was released and could go.
    From an upstairs window, Ruth watched Mrs. Holland make her way to the car. May and Helen were not speaking. Helen was ready to forgive, but to May, who had been unkind, the victim was odious, and she avoided her with a kind of prudishness impossible to explain to anyone, let alone herself. They had all made mistakes, Ruth thought. She wondered if she would ever care enough about anyone to make all the mistakes those around her had made during the rainy-day tea with Mrs. Holland. She breathed on the window, idly drew a heart, smiled placidly, let it fade.

Jorinda and Jorindel

    A summer night: all night someone has been learning the Charleston.
    “I’ve got it!” the dancer cries. “I’ve got it, everybody. Watch me, now!” But no one is watching. The dancer is alone in the dining room, clinging to the handle of the door; the rest of the party is in the living