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amiable-looking boy in a ski sweater and jeans. His black hair seemed almost girlishly long to Ricky, but the width of his shoulders promised that when he started to fill out, he would be a much bigger man than his father. Presumably his hair didn't look girlish to girls. "Just walking around?"

    "That's right," Peter said. "Sometimes it's fun just to walk around town and look at things."

    Ricky nearly beamed. "Why that's right! I feel exactly the same thing myself. I always enjoy my walks across town. The strangest things pop into my head. I was just thinking that sidewalks changed the world. They made everything much more civilized."

    "Oh?" said Peter, looking at him curiously.

    "I know, I know—I told you strange things occur to me. Heavens. How is Walter these days?"

    "He's fine. He's at the bank now."

    "And Christina, she's fine too?"

    "Sure," Peter said, and there was a touch of coolness in his response to the question about his mother. A problem there? He remembered that Walter had complained to him some months before that Christina had become a little moody. But for Ricky, who could remember Peter's parents' generation as teenagers, their problems were always a little, fictional—how could people with the world still in front of them have truly serious problems?

    "You know," he said, "we haven't talked like this in ages. Is your father reconciled to your going to Cornell yet?"

    Peter smiled wryly. "I guess so. I don't think he knows how tough it is to get into Yale. It was a lot easier when he went."

    "No doubt it was," said Ricky, who had just remembered the circumstances under which he had last had a conversation with Peter Barnes. John Jaffrey's party: the evening on which Edward Wanderley had died.

    "Well, I guess I'll poke around in the department store for a while," Peter said.

    "Yes," Ricky said, remembering against his will all the details of that evening. It seemed to him at times that life had darkened since that night: that a wheel had turned.

    "I guess I'll go now," Peter said, and stepped backward.

    "Oh, don't let me hold you up," Ricky said. "I was just thinking."

    "About sidewalks?"

    "No, you scamp." Peter turned away, smiling and saying goodbye, and strode easily up the side of the square.

    Ricky spotted Sears James's Lincoln cruising past the Archer Hotel at the top of the square, going as usual ten miles an hour slower than anyone else, and hurried on his way to Wheat Row. Somberness had not been evaded: he saw again the skeletal branches thrusting through the brilliant leaves, the implacable bloodied face of the girl on the film poster, and remembered that it was his turn to tell the story at the Chowder Society meeting that night. He hastened on, wondering what had become of his high spirits. But he knew: Edward Wanderley. Even Sears had followed them, the other three members of the Chowder Society, into that gloom. He had twelve hours to think of something to talk about.

    "Oh, Sears," he said on the steps of their building. His partner was just pushing himself out of the Lincoln. "Good morning. It's at your house tonight, isn't it?"

    "Ricky," said Sears, "at this hour of the morning it is positively forbidden to chirp."

    Sears lumbered forward, and Ricky followed him through the door leaving Milburn behind.
    Frederick Hawthorne
    1
    Of all the rooms in which they habitually met, this was Ricky's favorite—the library in Sears James's house, with its worn leather chairs, tall indistinct glass-fronted bookcases, drinks on the little round tables, prints on the walls, the muted old Shiraz carpet beneath their feet and the rich memory of old cigars in the atmosphere. Having never committed himself to marriage, Sears James had never had to compromise his luxurious ideas of comfort. After so many years of meeting together, the other men were by now unconscious of the automatic pleasure and relaxation and envy they experienced in Sears's library, just as they were nearly unconscious