In pants and bra, Billie Hauman stood before the mirror, doing her face. Ethel Grandin, dressed, watched her from the wicker chair. She did not really hear the aimless chatter. She was thinking: Billie’s such a pretty girl, too bad she doesn’t have a better figure. Neither malice nor envy prompted this thought. Billie’s was the classic soft womanly figure so well represented in art, the curvy form which artists loved to paint but which had been scorned by women of her generation. It was not at all the mold of the modern girl, the kind of figure she herself had aspired to and achieved. Billie’s lushness may well have been the natural complement to the hard upright body of the male, but in Ethel Grandin’s eyes the hips were too wide, the waist too narrow, the thighs thick, too soft, even rather fatty.

“Oh I’m so tired,” Billie was saying. “That water just enervates me.”

“You can take a nap after lunch, if you like.”

“Funny how that word sounds different than what it means. ‘Enervate’ ought to mean pep you up, give you energy or something.” Billie was adapting herself to the wife of the college professor she could not lose sight of in Mrs. Grandin. “There’s a lot of words like that when you come to think of it. I wrote them down in a notebook once. Just for fun; you know how you do those things. I remember one of them was ‘meretricious.’ It ought to mean ‘meritorious’ or something of merit, like. But it means just the opposite. Look,” she said, pointing out the window, “there goes that Coast Guard man again. Wouldn’t you think he’d get sick and tired of the same old walk all the time?” She drew in her lips and pressed them tight together to rub the lipstick in. “They’re certainly not breaking their necks, are they? I’m starved.” She moved away from the bureau, picked up her white dress, and slipped it over her head. Then she began to work on her hair. “Goodness, the way he thrashed around this morning, isn’t it the limit? I don’t know how he does it after all he’s been through.”

“You mean Guadalcanal?”

“I was thinking of the hospital and all those months he was so sick. There was a long time when they thought he wasn’t going to live. But he comes up very fast out of anything like that. I remember once in high school he broke a few ribs in a football game and a couple of days later he was right back in school. A couple of days!”

“Have you known him long, Billie?”