“Can I help you?”

“Go change your dress, dear. You don’t want to get your pretty dress soiled.”

Abra tiptoed past her father’s door and went to her own room. It was harsh bright with varnish, papered brightly. Framed photographs of her parents on the bureau, poems framed on the walls, and her closet—everything in its place, the floor varnished, and her shoes standing diligently side by side. Her mother did everything for her, insisted on it—planned for her, dressed her.

Abra had long ago given up having any private things in her room, even any personal thing. This was of such long standing that Abra did not think of her room as a private place. Her privacies were of the mind. The few letters she kept were in the sitting room itself, filed among the pages of the two-volume Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, which to the best of her knowledge had never been opened by anyone but herself since it came off the press.

Abra felt pleased, and she did not inspect the reason. She knew certain things without question, and such things she did not speak about. For example, she knew that her father was not ill. He was hiding from something. Just as surely she knew that Adam Trask was ill, for she had seen him walking along the street. She wondered whether her mother knew her father was not ill.

Abra slipped off her dress and put on a cotton pinafore, which was understood to be for working around the house. She brushed her hair, tiptoed past her father’s room, and went downstairs. At the foot of the stairs she opened her binder and took out Aron’s postcard. In the sitting room she shook Aron’s letters out of Volume II of the Memoirs, folded them tightly, and, raising her skirt, tucked them under the elastic which held up her panties. The package made her a little lumpy. In the kitchen she put on a full apron to conceal the bulge.

“You can scrape the carrots,” her mother said. “Is that water hot?”

“Just coming to a boil.”

“Drop a bouillon cube in that cup, will you, dear? The doctor says it’ll build your father up.”

When her mother carried the steaming cup upstairs, Abra opened the incinerator end of the gas stove, put in the letters, and lighted them.

Her mother came back, saying, “I smell fire.”

“I lit the trash. It was full.”

“I wish you’d ask me when you want to do a thing like that,” her mother said. “I was saving the trash to warm the kitchen in the morning.”

“I’m sorry, Mother,” Abra said. “I didn’t think.”

“You should try to think of these things. It seems to me you’re getting very thoughtless lately.”

“I’m sorry, Mother.”

“Saved is earned,” said her mother.

The telephone rang in the dining room. Her mother went to answer it. Abra heard her mother say, “No, you can’t see him. It’s doctor’s orders. He can’t see anyone—no, not anyone.”