"Now it used to be..." Mr. Marston says.

"...Theses, briefs, Business School reports," Mrs. Marston says.

"Yes," Mr. Marston says. "Briefs. We had girls here, and we subcontracted the typing."

Mr. Marston, who was born in New Hampshire and is thin and precise-looking, bought the business from Alice Darling, who had been in the building for 25 years herself, because he was interested in getting into the secretarial field. He and Mrs. Marston, who have been married 39 years, have enjoyed their life together in the Concord Building, and they have no plans to retire soon. Business is good--"It stays about the same, as does any business that's operated for quite a while," Mr. Marston says--and the location is almost ideal for a small printing and typing company.

It's not really an ideal location for the Betty Lee Beauty Shop, though, because, owner Marguerite Fuller says, "we don't get too many girls any more." The girls, Fuller says, all wear their hair long and straight these days, and it hurts business. "I don't think that style is becoming to everyone," Fuller says. "Some of them can wear it, of course, but you have to have a certain kind of hair." Nowadays, most of the shop's customers are business women and elderly women, Fuller says.

Still, a mood of optimism pervades the Betty Lee Beauty Shop. Its two rooms are bright and cheery, full of light and mirrors and colors. There is a screen that modestly shields from view women who are having their hair done, and it is covered with vinyl in a pattern consisting of the word "love" repeated over and over. Fuller bought the business from Mary Ryan, who had started it in 1938--no one knows where the name Betty Lee came from--and has thrived there ever since. She doesn't know exactly how she ended up being a hairdresser she is after all, 70 years old, and says she decided on the profession "so long ago that I forget why I did it now."

Since she bought the business, Fuller has worked with Anne O'Neill, who has been at the shop there since its founding in 1938. O'Neill wears a white uniform to work every day, although Fuller has no set outfit and is less prim. They both like the Concord Building. "I love Harvard Square," Fuller says. "There's lots of activity, lots of young people. This is an old building, very comfortable. It's been fairly well taken care of."

Up on the third floor of the Concord Building is a younger generation, two artists in their late 20's who have large airy studios that are filled with light. Neither of them has been in the building long and neither spends much time there or has much contact with the other tenants.

Carol Warner, who is 28 and does interiors of rooms on large canvases, stacking them up against a side wall when she finishes them, works as a waitress at Ferdinand's and lives up in Porter Square. Her studio isn't expensive, though, and she very much wants to be a full-time painter one day. She likes the Concord Building, too, because it is old and has a nice atmosphere. It's kind of gray, actually, and Warner has to admit that gray dominates her paintings. "It's the mood I like to paint in," she says. "I like to play colors against a neutral background," She hasn't sold any of her paintings yet, but hopes one day to have a one-man show.

Dennis Leder, a 29-year-old Jesuit who will be ordained into the priesthood in June, works across the hall, where he looks out on Mass Ave and Boylston Street and like Warner slowly works his way toward artistic success. Leder lives in a Jesuit community in Cambridge and studies at the Weston School of Theology, where he came from New York City a year and a half ago. He decided he wanted to be a priest when he was 18 years old, because of the priesthood's "elements of service to people."

Leder's studio is cluttered with his work, all in a wide variety of sizes, colors, styles and media. There is a huge still-life on one wall; small washes on another; an abstract sculpture; a Spanish nobleman's portrait; a land-scape like one of Cezanne's. "An idiom," Leder says, "will emerge. I don't want to be tied down to any specific thing. Most painters are in their forties before their own particular way of painting emerges."

Now Leder likes best some of his smaller works--a drawing of the Charles River and an oil painting of an Italian garden where he once studied. The best thing about the painting is "the abstract quality, the things alluded to but not defined," while in the drawing "it may be day or night; there's a lot of mystery and ambiguity." Leder says he would like to capitalize on that sense of mystery, but then again, he might decide a little later on that some of his other paintings, outstanding for different qualities, are really his favorites.

So Leder continues to dabble in this and that, still searching, for five hours each day. He likes to look out past his easel at the Square down below, but he doesn't paint it. He worries sometimes about being a painter and a priest at the same time--they're really quite similar, you see, but sometimes people don't seem to understand that. Actually Leder's goals as a priest and as a painter are practically identical, and in his own mind, at least, he has it all worked out quite well. "I strive," he says, "for communication with the transcendant." His gaze drifts out past his easel again, over the rooftops to the hills of Watertown. "I really believe that."