TIME: the present.

SCENE: A coffee-shop on the way to Piraeus. Two ladies, Clodia and Augustina, both in their early forties, sitting at adjacent tables. Clodia gets up and tentatively addresses Augustina; she sits down at Augustina’s table once she has introduced herself.

Clodia: Excuse me—I seem to know you, though I can’t for the life of me remember from where and when.

Augustina: My dear Clodia, how lovely to see you again! Let’s see—it’s over twenty years. Don’t you remember, we used to sit together whispering at the back of O.B.’s class on informal logic.

Clodia: Oh yes, Augustina! Have you got a few minutes? I have, and would very much like to find out how life has been treating you. Don’t look pained so directly—surely the last twenty years haven’t been that bad for you!

Augustina: Well, I doubt whether it has been as bad as the siege of Leningrad or the Warsaw ghetto. But if you sincerely ask me whether I have been in general happy during the time since we last met, and you expect an honest answer, that answer must be no... By the way, why was our esteemed lecturer called O.B.?

Clodia: That I can remember. O.B. was short for Old Bedsocks. According to the more charitable, the reference was to the mustiness of his discourse. Those who sat in the front row said the mustiness also pertained to his person.

Augustina: Well, never mind about O.B. What I remember most about the two of us at the time was how proud we were to be Catholics, in those days of obvious moral chaos in the world at large, and exuberant theological absurdity (as it seemed to us) among the non-Catholics, in the early sixties.