In the tired brilliance of late afternoon she walked along Empory Avenue, a small, rather thin girl with short-cropped brown hair, walking very straight-backed, head up, her brown coat slung carelessly over her arm. She walked because she hated to ride on buses, and because, on foot, she could stop when and wherever she wished.

Traffic in two streams moved along the street. Merchants were beginning to emerge and roll up their awnings; the stores of Pacific Park were shutting for the day.

To her right were the stucco buildings that made up Pacific Park High School. Three years ago, in 1950, she had graduated from that school. Cooking, civics, and American history; that was what they had taught her. She had been able to use the cooking. In 1951 she had got her first job: receptionist at the Ace Loan Company on Pine Street. In late 1951, bored, she had quit and gone to work for Tom Bolden.

Some job that was-typing letters to department stores about chrome kitchen chairs. And the chairs weren't very well built, either; she had tried them out.

She was twenty years old, and she had lived in Pacific Park all her life. She did not dislike the town; it seemed too frail to survive dislike. It, and its people, played odd little games, and the games were taken seriously, as were the games of her childhood: rules that could not be broken, rituals that involved life and death. And she, with curiosity, asking why this rule, why that custom, and playing anyhow ... until boredom came, and, after it, a wondering contempt that left her cut off and alone.

At the Rexall drugstore she halted a moment and inspected the rack of paperbound books. Bypassing the novels-they were too full of nonsense-she selected a volume entitled Thirty Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary. That, and a copy of the Pacific Park Leader, cost her thirty-seven cents.

She was coming out of the drugstore when two shapes encountered her. "Hi," one said, a young man, well-dressed. A salesman from Frug's Menswear; his companion was unknown to her. "Seen Gordon today? He's looking for you."