She started to walk away. “Will you be here tomorrow?” he asked, following.

She didn’t answer.

“At least tell me your name.”

“I’m not what you’re looking for,” she said. She stopped and faced him and he liked the hard scorn in her eyes. “You want a little thrill-girl to liven up a dull day at the beach. I don’t have any thrills to give you, mister. Why don’t you just try somewhere else.”

Next time she looked around was when she reached the bottom of the stairs at the Elevated.

“Just tell me your name.

“Please,” he said quietly.

“Dorothy Williams.”

Standing there and staring up as she climbed the steep stairs was hardly the respectable thing to do, but he could not tear his eyes away until she had dropped the token into the turnstile at the top and disappeared through the revolving doors.

Pretty soon a train like a ground-trembling dragon blotted out the light overhead and when it went away, so did he.

The sun shone but the heat was gone, no doubt for good. He wore his bathing trunks anyway and somehow was unsurprised to find her there when he arrived. They greeted each other shyly and she offered no objection when he spread his blanket next to hers, where the sand was softest.

They talked.

“I looked my eyes out all week.”

“I was in school. Yesterday was my first free day.”

“You’re a student?”

“A teacher. Junior high school art, seventh and eighth grades. You’re a musician?”

He nodded, realizing it was not a lie and not wanting to get into the rest of it yet, wanting to learn all about her. “Do you paint, sculpture in stone, make things out of clay?”

She nodded.

“Which?” he said. “I mean, what’s your special thing?”

“I’m fair at all of it, good at nothing. That’s why I teach. If I had real talent—if I could work the way you play—I’d want to go at it all the time.”

He smiled and shook his head. “That’s an amateur’s line. ‘Do or die for creativity, all you terribly talented people, while the rest of us unfortunates watch you in comfort.’”

“You have no right to call me a hypocrite,” she said.

Even her displeasure pleased him. “I’m not doing that. But my initial impression is that you’re not a girl to take risks.”

“A maiden-aunt of a girl.”

“Hell, no. I didn’t say that.”

“I am kind of an old maid,” she conceded.

“How old?”

“Twenty-four last November.”

It surprised him; she was only a year younger than he. “You figure that’s it, you’re too withered for the marriage thing?”

“Oh, it has nothing to do with getting married. I’m talking about a frame of mind. I’m becoming very conservative.”

“A colored child has no right being conservative.”