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most shoes.”
    However, although it has a sound of reason, even of fairness, this diagnosis fails to cheer or even to convince Megan. Only years later is she able to diagnose its basic fallacy, which is that thedefects Lavinia mentions as her own are quite acceptable—are classy, “aristocratic,” even. Of course it is preferable to be too thin, and to have dry skin rather than a face that perpetually shines and is often red, not to mention a tendency to bumps. And small breasts surely suggest greater refinement than large ones do. And what could be more regal than a long, narrow, high-arched foot?
    Lavinia has a carefully, delicately nurtured air about her; her look is ethereal, and certainly nonsexual. Whereas Megan looks strong, and clearly sexual. She sees herself as a peasant, in contrast to Lavinia.
    Cathy comes back into the room, and Megan thinks how
punished
she looks; wicked or not, Cathy looks miserable. Her pale skin is mottled, as though on the verge of breaking out, and her eyes are clouded. Megan feels a surge of sympathy for Cathy which is almost as strong as her curiosity as to what really happened. How awful Cathy must feel, and obviously does feel—but what exactly did she do, with the boy from the ROTC, besides just drinking too much?
    With what is either an intuitive flash, a look into Megan’s mind, or is more probably the continuation of an earlier conversation with Cathy, Lavinia now tells Megan, “She won’t say exactly what went on, so we can all think the worst.” She shoots a look at Cathy.
    Sounding more guilty than defensive, Cathy gets out, “I keep telling you, we just drank a lot of stingers at the Pudding, and then on the way home I guess we necked a lot.”
    “Well, I only hope his hangover is worse than yours is,” severe Lavinia pronounces, piously adding, “And I hope he calls you very soon.”
    At that last Cathy looks so stricken that Megan grasps that Lavinia has probed to Cathy’s darkest fear: Cathy is afraid, she
knows,
that the ROTC boy will never call her again; he is the kind of boy who would not approve of a girl who would neck on a first date, the kind of boy that in fact George Wharton could have turned out to be, and maybe really, basically, he is.
    None of which Lavinia could know about—or could she? Justhow good-natured is her teasing? For the moment Megan cannot decide, or rather, she decides to avoid such conclusions.
    Lavinia makes their tea on a hot plate, and distributes it very grandly, in the thick white dormitory mugs, along with Peg’s mother’s chocolate-chip cookies, from a cracked blue plate.
    “Tea is the best possible thing for a hangover,” Lavinia instructs. “The morning after my cousin’s coming-out party, oh, I wanted to die! A friend of mine, Kitty—Kitty and I were so thirsty we drank a gallon of water, and that just made us drunk all over again! You must never drink water the morning after champagne. Anyway finally somebody, the maid, I guess, fed us both some tea, and by the time of the lunch party we felt almost human again. Kitty, now there’s a wild girl—” And Lavinia laughs, in a nostalgic, reminiscent way, as vividly glamorous images flow into Megan’s receptive imagination, a compound of literature and Hollywood: she sees a debut, a Scott Fitzgerald party. Bare powdered shoulders, corsages of orchids, gardenias. Floating chiffon, and men in tuxedoes, or gold-braided uniforms these days. And Lavinia (Carole Lombard! Daisy Buchanan!) lightly dancing, sipping champagne.
    Lavinia does have beautiful hands, Megan notices, as Lavinia pours out more tea. The white nails are perfect ovals, fingers long and narrow; even the tight white skin on her hands looks polished. Megan resolves to do her own nails more often; maybe you have to do them every day, to have them look like that?
    Now in her most serious voice Lavinia is asking Megan, “But do you really like it, living over there in Bertram?” Concern fills those wide gray