gs by till Tuesday, and there I am at Coney Island bright
and early. Tom is easy enough to find, pacing up and down the boardwalk
like a tiger. We say "Hi" and so forth, and I'm all ready to take a run
for the water, but he keeps snapping his fingers and looking up and down
the boardwalk.

Finally he says, "There's a girl I used to know pretty well. I didn't see
her for a while till last week, and we got in an argument, and I guess
she's mad. I wrote and asked her to come swimming today, but maybe she's
not coming."

I figure it out that I'm there as insurance against the girl not showing
up, but I don't mind. Anyhow, she does show up. It can't have been too
much of an argument they had, because she acts pretty friendly.

Tom introduces us. Her name is Hilda and a last name that'd be hard to
spell--Swedish maybe--and she's got a wide, laughing kind of mouth and a big
coil of yellow hair in a bun on top of her head, and a mighty good figure.
She asks me where I ran into Tom, and we tell her all about Cat and the
cellar at Number Forty-six, and I tell them both about my Ivy-League
haircut, which I had never explained to anyone before. They get a laugh
out of that, and then she asks him about the filling-station job, and he
says it stinks.

I figure they could get along without me for a while, so I go for a swim
and wander down the beach a ways and eat a hot dog and swim some more.
When I come back, I see Tom and Hilda just coming out of the water, so I
join them. Hilda says, "Come have a coke. Tom says he's got to try
swimming to France just once more."

I don't know just what she means, but we go get cokes and come back and
stretch out in the sun. She asks me do I want a smoke, and I say No. It's
nice to be asked, though. We watch Tom, who is swimming out past all the
other people. I wish I'd gone with him. I say, "Lifeguard's going to
whistle him in pretty soon. He's out past all the others."

Hilda lets out a breath and snorts, "He'll always go till they blow the
whistle. Always got to go farther than anyone else."

I don't know what to say to that, so I don't say anything.

Hilda goes on: "I used to wait tables in a restaurant down near Washington
Square. Tom and a lot of the boys from NYU came in there. Sometimes the
day before an exam he'd be sitting around for hours, buying people cokes
and acting as if he hadn't a care in the world. Some other times, for no
reason anyone could tell, he'd sit in a corner an