In her girlhood, she and her girlfriends at Browne & Nichols, in the innocent cruelty of their adolescent clique, had classified people into three types—Birds, Horses, and Muffins. Owen could not quite grasp it, just as he could not grasp the ritual she described, acquired when she was thirteen or so, of lying in bed and, when she could not sleep, resting her eyes, with religious rigor, on each of the ceiling’s four corners. It meant more to her than she could say, or would say.

“A cute little bird?” he asked. “Chirp, chirp?”

“Not really,” Phyllis said, pursing her lips in a concentrating, solemn way he adored, crinkling the unpainted flesh of them. Making a moue, she told him it was called, when he had lovingly described this expression of hers to her. Now she told him, “A big lazy bird that hovers all day, in circles, hardly moving its wings, and then swoops to the kill.”

“Oh, dear! I sound frightful.”

“No more than anybody else. Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill,” she said. She explained, “That’s from Shakespeare,” adding, “Just using mouthwash—think of all those microbes you kill.”

“I’m shocked,” he said, “that you could ever see me killing anything. I can’t even step on a spider. I have a phobia about them.” Yet he was pleased by her description, as granting him some initiative and force, when his inmost sense of himself was of an innocent witness, acted upon but not acting. He snuggled closer into Phyllis’s cool warmth and asked, “And you? What are you? I keep forgetting.”

She was shy of talking about herself, as if touching too tender or shameful a part of her body, or as if her ego was difficult to locate. “Not a Horse,” she said. “I have a Birdy look, but am really a Muffin, inside.”

“Surely not.”

She was offended. “Muffins aren’t a bad thing to be. They’re accepting. They’re non-disruptive. They don’t hurt anybody.”

He saw himself swooping in her mind, a dark shape empowered to hurt. “Not even other Muffins?”

“They don’t meet other Muffins, Muffins are too rare. Most people are Horses, clumping along.”

He laughed at the subtlety of this boast. She valued herself highly enough, but in terms so subtle as to be almost beyond him, like higher math, or the fine points of a foreign grammar.

Impatient with self-exposition, she reverted to an earlier topic: “I showed my father the most unpleasant and threatening of Ralph’s letters, and Daddy wrote him one of his own, mentioning legal action.”

Owen felt relief; he wouldn’t have to handle it, then. Her father was still in charge. “Well, good. And did that shut the creep up?”

“We don’t know yet. That was just days ago.”

“You poor angel, you’re still in the middle of this, aren’t you? Uh, did your father have to write to any other boyfriends?”