blue cabs on the misty morning turnpike). "There were these comic strips about a boy who dreams. The comic strip is all his dream, his Dreamland. Dreamland is beautiful; palaces and processions are always folding up and shrinking away, or growing huge and out of hand, or when you look closely turn out to be something else—you know—just like real dreams, only always pretty. Great-aunt Cloud says she saved them because the man who drew them, his name was Stone, once was an architect in the City, with George's great-grandfather and mine! They were 'Beaux-Arts' architects. Dreamland is very 'Beaux-Arts'. Stone was a drunkard—that's the word Cloud uses. The boy in the dreams always looks sleepy and surprised at the same time. He reminds me of you."
After beginning thus timidly, their letters eventually became so face-to-face that when at last they met again, in the bar of the old hotel (outside whose leaded windows snow fell) they both wondered if there had been some mistake, if Somehow they had sent all those letters to the wrong person, this person, this unflcused and nervous stranger. That passed in an instant, but for a while they had to take turns speaking at some length, because it was the only way they knew; the snow turned to blizzard, the cafe-royale turned cold; a phrase of hers fell in with one of his and one of his with one of hers and, as elated as if they were the first to discover the trick of it, they conversed.
"You don't get—well—bored up there, all alone all the time?" Smoky asked, when they had practiced a while.
"Bored?" She was surprised. It seemed like an idea that hadn't before occurred to her. "No. And we're not alone."
"Well, I didn't mean . . . What sort of people are they?"
"What people?"
"The people . . . you're not alone with."
"Oh. Well. There used to be a lot of farmers. It was Scotch immigrants at first there. MacDonald, MacGregor, Brown. There aren't so many farms now. But some. A lot of people up there now are our relatives, too, sort of. You know how it is."
He didn't, exactly. A silence fell, and rose as they both started to speak at once, and fell again. Smoky said: "It's a big house?"
She smiled. "Enormous." Her brown eyes were deliquescent in the lamplight. "You'll like it. Everybody does. Even George, but he says he doesn't."
"Why?"
"He's always getting lost there."
Smoky smiled to think of George, the pathfinder, the waymaker through sinister night streets, baffled in an ordinary house. He tried to remember if in a letter he'd used the joke about city mice and country mice. She said: "Can I tell you something?"
"Sure." His heart beat fast, with no reason to.
"I knew you, when we met."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean I recognized you." She lowered her furry red-gold lashes, then stole a quick look at him, then looked around the somnolent bar as though someone might overhear her. "I'd been told about you."
"By George."
"No, no. A long time ago. When I was a kid."
"About me?"
"Well not about you exactly. Or about you exactly but I didn't know that till I met you." On the plaid tablecloth, she cupped her elbows in her hands, and leaned forward. "I was nine; or ten. It had been raining for a long time. Then there was a morning when I was walking Spark in the Park—"
"What?"
"Spark was a dog we had. The Park is, you know, the grounds around. There was a breeze blowing, and it felt like the rain was going to end. We were all wet. Then I looked west: there was a rainbow. I remembered what my mother said: morning rainbow in the west, then the weather will be best."
He imagined her very vividly, in a yellow slicker and high widemouthed boots, and her hair finer even and curlier than now; and wondered how she knew which way west was, a problem he still sometimes stumbled over.
"It was a rainbow, but bright, and it looked like it came down just—there, you know, not far; I could see the grass, all sparkling and stained every color there. The sky had got big, you know, the way it does when it clears at last after a long rainy time, and everything looked near; the place the rainbow came down was near; and I wanted more than anything to go stand in it—and look up—and be covered with colors."
Smoky laughed. "That's hard," he said.
She laughed too, dipping her