“Yes, we did it all,” Jason was saying. “SDS, draft evasion, fighting Nixon and pollution and the corporations. We integrated, boycotted lettuce and grapes, and backed the New Left. And then we ended right back in the system. I’ve just passed my law boards, by the way.”

“That’s great, Jason. And I’ve just got my master’s.” Tina took a deep bite of peach and licked the juice that overran her lips. “Going on for my doctorate,” she said awkwardly, lapping up the juice with her tongue curled at the side of her mouth. “I can remember my mother saying about Duke ‘He doesn’t have a core’ because he kept dropping out of Harvard. And I’d get real angry and say, ‘Who’s got a core, these days? Even the big old elm trees I always remember at the grandparents’ place in Gloversville are dead of inner rot.’ God, I was so smart-assed! All the regrets I’ve got—God! Maybe we were just into pranks. Maybe my grandparents were right, after all, to think the protest was just kid-stuff. Where’s all the protest now?”

“I know what you mean, Tina. In college we could march and sit in and hassle the administration. But once we’re into big life choices like whether or not to go to law school or graduate school, then suddenly there’s no room to maneuver and we’re in the system. I had the same feelings when it was time for me to go to law school, and the only way I could handle it was to remind myself that I was working in Vista and that I wasn’t going into corporate law; I was going to be doing civil rights and I was needed.”

“Sure, you’re needed. But what about me? I’ve got to justify myself in this day and age for being in the classics. It’s sheer indulgence, everyone tells me. ‘Who needs Latin and Dante?’ Weezy says. My grandfather says, ‘You should study something practical—be a secretary. You’ve got the personality for it,’ he tells me, ‘not like your mother.’ I should be engaged in politics, or be an activist in the women’s movement. How can I justify doing what I love?”

“Well, just because you are doing what you love, I suppose. That is the human ideal, isn’t it? Someone must be willing to carry on the traditions of the past and that’s your role.”