Then he did laugh out loud and she frowned, but he could see her excusing him as she went on, ‘It was so hot upstairs I thought I’d like to come down for a while and sit out here.’

‘Were you asleep?’ he asked. ‘Did we wake you?’

‘I was doing my homework,’ she said.

He looked at her again, seeing her against a background of careful penmanship and themes, worn textbooks and laughter between desks. ‘You’re in high school?’

‘I’m a Senior.’ She seemed to wait for him to say something, and then she said, ‘I was out a year when I had pneumonia.’

He found it difficult to think of something to say (ask her about boys? basketball?), and so he pretended he was listening to the distant noises from the front of the house. ‘It’s a fine party,’ he said again, vaguely.

‘I suppose you like parties,’ she said.

Dumbfounded, he sat staring into his empty coffee cup. He supposed he did like parties; her tone had been faintly surprised, as though next he were to declare for an arena with gladiators fighting wild beasts, or the solitary circular waltzing of a madman in a garden. I’m almost twice your age, my girl, he thought, but it’s not so long since I did homework too. ‘Play basketball?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she said.

He felt with irritation that she had been in the kitchen first, that she lived in the house, that he must keep on talking to her. ‘What’s your homework about?’ he asked.

‘I’m writing a paper on the future of the world,’ she said, and smiled. ‘It sounds silly, doesn’t it? I think it’s silly.’

‘Your party out front is talking about it. That’s one reason I came out here.’ He could see her thinking that that was not at all the reason he came out here, and he said quickly, ‘What are you saying about the future of the world?’

‘I don’t really think it’s got much future,’ she said, ‘at least the way we’ve got it now.’

‘It’s an interesting time to be alive,’ he said, as though he were still at the party.

‘Well, after all,’ she said, ‘it isn’t as though we didn’t know about it in advance.’

He looked at her for a minute; she was staring absently at the toe of her saddle shoe, moving her foot softly back and forth, following it with her eyes. ‘It’s really a frightening time when a girl of sixteen has to think of things like that.’ In my day, he thought of saying mockingly, girls thought of nothing but cocktails and necking.

‘I’m seventeen.’ She looked up and smiled at him again. ‘There’s a terrible difference,’ she said.

‘In my day,’ he said, overemphasizing, ‘girls thought of nothing but cocktails and necking.’