This time he said, "That was the manager who just walked out, gone for the day. "Some people did not even have the courage to argue an answer of no.

By this time she was no longer embarrassed. She thought of the Weathermen arguing with bricks and stones through store windows, and of the shopkeepers who had told the news interviewers, "I don't understand. I oppose the war, so does everyone. Why break my window?"

AT THE entrance to the seventh store she paused. The wind blew straight black hair gently across her face.

There was no violence in the air. No men masked from view by gas masks. No clubs and guns. Only a store-front window that reflected the afternoon sun, and an owner who would probably be kind but firm and negative.

The intellectual arguments about the military-industrial complex, about the legitimacy of the American involvement, about the nature of U.S. imperialism, and about the NLF being the real representative force were all too distant now. They mattered little in the arguments she put forth to another individual. She was asking someone to close up shop to end the war. Arguing about the systems that dictated this disaster, denied the right of the individual to change things. And her arguments were now about the ability of the individual to collectively alter the course of the nation.

She walked into the drugstore. Six times the answer had been no, and with each experience her feelings about her involvement in the protest had changed. Her embarrassment had given way to the feeling that those with whom she dealt should be embarrassed. The sense of playing games and the attitude of one-ups-manship had given way to the feeling of urgency. Perhaps, she thought, her friends would argue against the importance of her work, but now it was important to her.

"Excuse me," she began and was finally directed to the manager after several intermediaries. The manager was standing up over the back-counter conversing with his wife.

When she asked about closing the store, the wife spoke up first. "We are opposed to the war, opposed to the killing and all that, but I don't see how closing the store will stop the war. And besides you are asking my husband to sacrifice his income and we can't afford it."

The wife had spoken with all the cliches that were in the book. But they had to be answered as if they were questions that one had never met before. They had to be faced as if they were a real confrontation.

Before the Cliffie chose her words, however, the wife added, "I think all this protest is irrelevant."

Back in his room at the end of the same day a Harvard senior entered this into his personal log-book. "I realized just several minutes ago that I am coming close to the afterlife, the real life. I am not scared but I am apprehensive.

"Ever since I came here I have had the security of being insulated. First three years of insulation, then two and finally one. The years have peeled away like the blankets on my bed. Now I am cold and can't sleep.

"What I think about when I can't sleep is the war I can't see or feel. People die and I live oblivious. What do I do? Go to a shrink or go to a doctor and ask him to find out what's wrong with me as I tell him where to look and make up things that I don't feel. Do I tell him with honesty that I just don't want to go into the Army to fight this war? Then am I chicken and will they scoff at me? Will I be affected? Is the war really wrong? But is it so right I should die for it?

"Does one take up the banner of righteousness and telling the real world where to get off, go out to join the pariahs? Can I resist the war and suffer the jails? Is one morally worse or better for one or the other? And if I leave the land of the brave what will I do if I want to come back? Can I go away forever?

"Stillness prevails but no sleep overcomes me.