“Maybe Little Red Riding Hood would like that.”

Cathy felt the blush rising in her throat after she had said it. Whatever is happening to me? she thought, and quickly changed the subject to what seemed safer.

“I can get you some grass. There’s a boy in school who sells it.”

“It’s against the law.”

“Whose law? We didn’t make the laws. They were made by people who don’t understand.”

“Sure, they get soused and we get stoned. What’s the difference? But you can’t tell that to the judge.”

“You’re awfully good, Joel. Good to me, I mean.”

“Shit.”

They had reached the big stone gates into the driveway at the Ark, and there, as if something held them outside, as if going in were in some way dangerous or difficult, they stood. Joel leaned against a huge pile of snow, his arms folded, and Cathy watched him, wondering what to do or say next. She felt they were reaching some hard place. She felt as if happiness were slipping through her fingers like sand. But she didn’t know how to hold it back. Only poetry, perhaps, she thought, could hold it.

“Your hands are cold. Come up and I’ll make you some cocoa.”

But as soon as she had said the words, she knew they were all wrong. Joel was not a child to be comforted by cocoa.

“O.K.,” he said somberly. And they walked up the drive in silence until they were high enough to see the mountain, standing up there, marvelously dark blue and sharp against a pale sky.

“Cities may be all right but they don’t have mountains,” Cathy said. “It’s great, isn’t it?”

She took a deep breath. Joel was looking at her with a hard, intense look, not at the mountain. Neither of them noticed Christina, raking snow off one of the lower borders, flinging a pine bough off and peering down at a patch of lavender crocus in flower. But as she stood up, she saw them and waved and called, “Want some tea?”

“Thanks, Gram. I’m going to make cocoa. We’ll have it upstairs.”

Christina watched them go, two slight figures, up the porch steps and out of sight. She had the strange impression that each was, in some way, burdened. How hard to be young, she thought! To find your way, step by step, through the maze of feeling and the clouds of unknowing, shot through as they were, at least for Cathy, with radiance, and yet so intangible, shifting all the time. Was Marianne right not to be alarmed, to wish Cathy to be “involved,” even with this confused boy? Whatever happened would be costly for Cathy, Christina surmised.

While Cathy made cocoa, Joel stopped a moment to speak to Cornelius, who was getting impatient for Christina to come in and give him his tea.