She accepted the offer of a drink before lunch, and said she'd like an old-fashioned, so I ordered two of them. There was an exceptionally fresh clean look about her. She handled herself casually and well. "How well did you know Timmy?" she asked me. "Pretty well. In a deal like that you get to know people well. Whatever they are, it shows. You knew him well, too, I guess." "We went steady. It started seven years ago. Somehow it seems like longer than seven years. We were seniors in high school when it started. He'd been going with a friend of mine. Judy Currier. They had a sort of spat and they were mad at each other. I was mad at the boy I'd been going with. When he wanted to take me out I went. And we went together from then on. When we graduated we both went up to state college at Redding. He only went two years and then came back to help George. When he quit, I quit, too. We came back here and everybody thought we were going to get married." She smiled a small wry smile. "I guess I did, too. But then things changed. I guess he lost interest. He worked very hard. We drifted apart." "Were you in love with him?" She gave me a slightly startled glance. "I thought I was, of course. Otherwise we wouldn't have been as close. But--I don't know as I can explain it. You see, Timmy was very popular in high school. He was a good athlete, and everybody liked him. He was president of the senior class. I was popular, too. I was queen of the senior pageant and all that sort of thing. We both liked to dance and we were good at it. It was as if people _expected_ us to go together. It seemed right to other people. And that sort of infected us, I guess. Maybe we fell in love with the way we looked together, and felt the responsibility of what other people wanted us to be. We made a good team. Do you understand that?" "Of course." "When it finally ended it didn't hurt as badly as I would have thought it would. If it hadn't ended, we would have gone on and gotten married and--I guess it would have been all right." She looked puzzled. "What kind of a guy was he, Ruth?" "I told you. Popular and nice and--" "Underneath." "I don't want to feel--disloyal or anything." "Another drink?" "No. We better order, thanks." After we had given the order, she frowned beyond me and said, "There was something weak about Timmy. Things had come too easily. His mind was good and his body was good and he made friends without trying. He'd never been--tested. I had the feeling that he thought that things would always be that easy all his life. That he could always get whatever he wanted. It worried me because I'd learned the world isn't like that. It was as though nothing had ever happened to him to make him grow up. And I used to wonder what would happen when things started to go wrong. I knew he'd either turn into a man, or he'd start to whine and complain." "He turned into a man, Ruth."