"Good night, darling," he said to the ugly girl behind the desk. He couldn't resist that. She looked at him with the unbreakable superiority of the person who will not be called upon to die over the man who may.

Michael was still smiling as he started down the steps, but he felt depressed. The first day, he thought, I should have gone in the first day. I shouldn't've exposed myself to a scene like that. He felt soiled and suspect as he walked slowly through the mild late-winter night, among the strolling couples oblivious to the tattered, shabby war being fought between one soul and another, in their name, in the dirty loft over the Greek restaurant half a block away.

Two mornings later, when he went down for his mail, there was a card from his draft board. "As per your request," it read, "you will be reclassified as 1A on May 15." He laughed as he read it. They have salvaged victory out of the ruins of their campaign, he thought. But he felt relieved as he went upstairs again in the lift. There were no more decisions to be made.

NOAH opened his eyes in the soft dawn light and looked at his wife. She sleeps, he thought, as though she were keeping a secret. Hope, he thought, Hope, Hope. She must have been one of those grave little girls, walking through that white clapboard town, always looking as though she was hurrying to some private destination. She probably had little caches of things stuffed away in the odd corners of her room, too. Feathers, dried flowers, old fashion-plates from Harper's Bazaar, drawings of women with bustles, that sort of thing. You didn't know anything about little girls. Would be different if you had sisters. Your wife came to you out of a locked vault of experience. Might just as well have come from the mountains of Tibet or a French nunnery. While he was smoking cigarettes under the roof at Colonel Druids Military Academy for Boys, We Take the Boy and Return the Man, what was she doing, walking gravely past the churchyard with all the Plowmans tucked in under the old turf? If there was a plan in anything, she was preparing for him then, preparing for this moment of sleeping beside him in the dawn light. And he had been preparing for her. If there was a plan. Impossible to believe. If Roger hadn't somehow met her (how did he meet her?). If Roger hadn't half-ironically decided to have a party to find him a girl. If Roger had brought one of the dozen other girls he knew, they wouldn't be lying here together this morning. Accident, the only law of life. Roger. "You make time and you make love dandy, You make swell molasses candy, But, honey, are you makin' any money? That's all I want to know." Caught in the Philippines, Bataan, if he had lived that long. And here they were in Roger's room, in Roger's bed, because it was more comfortable. Noah's old bed slanted to the right. It all started when he reached up for the copy of Yeats's The Heme's Egg and Other Plays on the Public Library shelf. If he had reached for another book, he wouldn't've bumped into Roger and he wouldn't have lived here and he wouldn't've met Hope and she probably would be lying in another bed now, with another man watching her, thinking, I love her, I love her. If you thought about it you stared into the pit of madness. No plan to anything. No plan to loving or dying or fighting or anything. The equation: Man plus his intentions equals Accident. Impossible to believe. The plan must be there, but cleverly camouflaged, the way a good playwright disguises his plot. At the moment you die perhaps everything is clear to you, you say, oh, now I see, that's why that character was introduced in the first act.

What time was it? Six-fifteen. Another five minutes in bed. This was going to be a kind of holiday today. No nervous thunder of the riveters, no wind on the scaffolds, none of the hiss and flare of the welders in the shipyard in Passaic. He had to go to his draft board today, and once more to Governor's Island to be examined.

Six-twenty. Time to get up. The doctors were waiting on the green island, the ferry with the General's name, the X-ray technicians, the rubber stamp with Rejected on it. What did they do in older wars? Before X-ray. How many men fought at Shiloh with scars on their lungs, all unknowing? How many men came to Borodino with stomach ulcers? How many at Thermopylae who would be turned back by their draft boards today for curvature of the spine? How many 4Fs perished outside Troy? Time to get up.

Hope stirred beside him. She turned to him and put her arm across his chest. She came slowly out from the backstage of sleep and ran her hand lightly, in half-slumbering possession, down his ribs and his stomach.

"Bed," she murmured, still in the grip of the last dream, and he grinned at her and gathered her close to him.

"What time is it?" she whispered, her lips close to his ear. "Is it morning? Do you have to go?"

"It's morning," he said. "And I have to go. But," and he smiled as he said it, and pressed the familiar, slender body, "but I think the government can wait another fifteen minutes."

Hope was washing her hair when she heard the key in the lock. She had come home from work and seen that Noah hadn't returned yet from Governor's Island, and she had pottered around the house, without switching on a lamp, in the summer twilight, waiting for him to get back.

With her head bent over the basin, and the soapy water dripping on to her closed eyelids, she heard Noah come into the big room.

"Noah," she called, "I'm in here," and she wrapped a towel around her head and turned to him, naked except for that. His face was sober and controlled. He held her loosely, gently touching the base of her neck, still wet from the rinsing.

"It happened," she said.

"Yes," he said.

"The X-ray?"

"Didn't show anything, I guess." His voice was remote and calm.

"Did you tell them?" she asked. "About the last time?"

"No."

She wanted to ask why not, but she stopped herself, because in a confused, intuitive way, she knew.

"You didn't tell them that you had a defence job, either, did you?"

"No."

"I'll tell them," she said loudly. "I'll go down myself. A man with scars on his lungs can't be…"

"Sssh," he said. "Sssh."

"It's silly," she said, trying to talk reasonably, like a debater.

"What good will a sick man do in the Army? You'll only crack up. It'll just be another burden for them. They can't make you a soldier…"

"They can try." Noah smiled slowly. "They sure can try. The least I can do is give them a chance. Anyway," and he kissed her behind the ear, "anyway, they've already done it. I was sworn in at eight o'clock tonight."

She pulled back. "What're you doing here then?"

"Two weeks," he said. "They give you two weeks to settle your affairs."

"Will it do any good," Hope asked, "for me to argue with you?"

"No," he said very softly.

"Damn them!" Hope said. "Why don't they get things straight the first time? Why," she cried, addressing the draft boards and the Army doctors and the regiments in the field and the politicians in all the capitals of the world, addressing the war and the time and all the agony ahead of her, "why can't they behave like sensible human beings?"

"Sssh," Noah said. "We only have two weeks. Let's not waste them. Have you eaten yet?"

"No," she said. "I'm washing my hair."

He sat down on the edge of the tub, smiling wearily at her.

"Finish your hair," he said, "and we'll go out to dinner. There's a place I heard about on Second Avenue where they have the best steaks in the world. Three dollars apiece, but they're…"

She threw herself down at his knees and held him tightly.