The next morning Mairin was in her office when Bea Warncke came in. "Hi!" Bea said. "I brought Mrs. Walters to her appointment with the low vision clinic. She seems a little more cheerful."

Bea was one of the most loyal volunteers that the agency had. She drove people to appointments, helped get out mailings, and conducted tours of the building for community groups. Her husband was a judge in common pleas court, and she’d been delighted when Mairin had said she was going to law school. "How’s it going?" she asked.

"I've only had one class so far," said Mairin. "Torts, last Thursday. It took me all weekend to get contracts and torts ready for this week. I wonder if I’ll be able to keep it up."

"You will!" Bea was always encouraging. She was a small woman who seemed to have incredible energy. She and Mairin often had coffee together. Bea had become a great favorite of the casework staff. She was often able to feed back very helpful information that clients didn’t give workers directly.

In comparison with torts, Mairin’s contracts class was exceedingly dry. Nothing terribly interesting happened in the cases themselves. Nobody punched someone else or threw a rock at someone. The professor was an older man, much slower-paced. He didn’t bombard the students with questions. In that respect he was much easier than Michael Morgan. His name was Hanson.

After the break, he passed around a mimeographed assignment sheet. "These are outside readings," he said. "They’re cases that aren’t in your casebook. The volumes are in the library. You are to have the outside cases read and briefed just like the ones in the casebook. If any of you are unprepared, please leave me a note before class. If I call on someone who is unprepared three times in the semester, he is out of the class."

Mairin and Rick walked out after class. "Christ," said Rick. "Outside cases. I can barely get the ones in the book done." He was a computer programmer with a demanding job, often requiring overtime.

"That’s not the half of it," said Mairin. "The other half is that we’re going to have to fight each other for the books. There are almost ninety of us in this section."

Rick sighed. "See you in the library," he said.

Mairin figured ahead. She knew what a late start she’d gotten the previous Saturday morning. This time she’d go to the law library after work on Friday and photocopy the cases. It was a hell of a way to spend Friday night, but she didn’t see any alternative. When she got there Friday, it appeared. that a number of students had had the same idea. The library was fairly full.

She dug the assignment sheet out of her notebook. The first case was followed by some numbers and letters: 84 N.H.114, l46 A.641 (1929). Mairin was completely perplexed. She walked up to the check-out desk and asked the young man on duty what the citations meant.

"These are the law reporters," he said. "You can find that case in the New Hampshire reports. They’re over there." He waved toward a range of stacks. He took pity on her bewildered expression. "Hanson’s cases, huh? Get used to Hanson’s cases!"

Mairin grinned and went in search of the books. Naturally, none of them were on the shelves. She walked up to one little knot of students. "Are these Hanson’s?" she asked.

"Sure are," said a big fellow with red hair. Mairin remembered him from class.

"Are you through with any that I can use?"

"Help yourself," he said. "I was going to read them, but the first one is ten pages. I decided to photocopy them."

"Me too," said Mairin. It cost her $2.50 to copy the cases, but she felt it was worth not having to struggle with the books there at the library. She never read well under pressure anyway. When she got home, she threw something in the oven. While it was cooking, she sat down in the sunroom and spread out the first outside case. The first page had a series of paragraphs with the symbol of a key and words like Contracts 21, Civil Procedure 453, etc. "Christ," she said and went to pour herself a glass of bourbon.

An hour later, with the help of the thick pamphlet and her own wits, she had figured out the following. That she was looking at the West keynumber headnotes prepared by West Publishing Co., the biggest in the business. Certain headnotes were not relevant to her case at all, at least in the sense that Hanson had chosen the case to make a specific point. In the first case, there were four other issues besides the one it had been chosen to illustrate.

Unfortunately, it had taken Mairin an hour and a half to discern this. She felt herself appreciating, however grudgingly, the editing that went into the casebooks. What now? she thought. Of five outside cases, I’ve read one. That’s four on top of the usual fifty pages tomorrow.

She turned on the TV news, poured some more bourbon on the rocks, and promptly fell asleep in her big chair in front of the TV. She had completed one full week of law school. Two of the classes were hard to prepare for; one was amazingly simple. It was also a crashing bore. Legal history and methods was a loser. It could have been exciting. It could have been philosophical. Instead it was nothing but an abbreviated outline of dates from history. Mairin wondered if it was a "giveaway," an admission by the faculty that three heavy courses would be impossible. It could be a giveaway and interesting, however, she thought. She woke up to an old movie at 1:30 and went to bed. As she fell asleep, she was wondering whether she could do this until June.

The following weeks maintained the pattern that the first week had set. Mairin joked about not having increased her reading and briefing rate beyond eight pages or so an hour. True, she looked up fewer words, but, as she told Carol, "No one speed reads law."

Mairin was meeting some of the other students. Her section had all its classes together, so the names and faces were falling into place. She and Rick maintained their friendship, sitting together, talking at breaks.

Mairin found herself curious about the other women in the class. One was married and had two children. One was blond and very beautiful. She seemed to be juggling two males. Sometimes one would meet her after class and sometimes another. One woman worked for a bank and another for an insurance company.

One evening, after class, Karen came up to her. Karen worked for a bank. She was always sharply dressed, always prepared in class, and always intelligent when she did talk. "Wait a minute, Mairin. I’d like to ask you something."

"Hi," said Mairin. "Wasn’t contracts a thrill tonight?" Hanson had become outraged upon finding that three people in a row had not done the outside reading.

Karen grimaced. "That reading is so much crap."

"I know," said Mairin. "It’s so unnecessary." Rick had told her that, by his calculations, the chances of getting called on to recite an outside case were so small as to make it worth his while not to read them. Mairin couldn’t think like that. She said she must have been born with a guilty conscience because she knew she’d be called on if she wasn’t prepared.

"I’ve been thinking," Karen began, "we’ll be having our practice exams in three weeks. What would you think of a study group?"

"I think it would be a help. We could get copies of the old tests from the library and work out the answers."

"Good idea. I figure that perhaps we women ought to form one group. There are the right number of us, and if we don’t include men, we won’t clutter our heads with who we want to date, etc."

"Very good," said Mairin. She saw Mariann ahead of them. "Shall we check Marriann?"

They called to her. Mariann was an insurance adjuster. Yes, she thought a study group would be a good idea. They’d catch the other two next class and set up a date.

As it turned out, they ended up meeting at Mairin’s. She had no roommate, no husband, and no children. They had an absolutely great time. They talked about themselves, they griped about law school, they ate popcorn and drank wine and beer. Unfortunately, they got precious little done, and the practice exams were two weeks away. The idea of the practice exam was that a law school exam was theoretically different from all others and therefore took practice to take. The first ones would be graded, but the grade wouldn’t count.

They agreed to meet again the following weekend at Karen’s. Her husband could go somewhere else for the afternoon unless he wanted to hear the chatter. They all left, and Mairin knocked on Linda’s door. "There’s some popcorn and beer if you want it."

"Do you know," continued Mairin, "for the first time I’m realizing what we’re missing as night students. We never have the chance to talk to one another, to go for a cup of coffee between classes, to talk about law in a conversational manner. We spent most of the afternoon talking and only a little of it studying. But what the hell, it was worth it."

Mairin wondered about that conclusion as she struggled that evening and the next few days to make up for the reading time that had been lost that afternoon. By the next weekend she’d barely caught up. This Sunday, at Karen’s, the group fought to stay on the subject alloted--- contracts. The contracts exam would take place the next day. They went over and over the outlines: unilateral contracts, bilateral contracts, contracts whose subject matter was illegal, promissory estoppel.

Mariann had checked the old exams in the library and had found that, since they were the year-end exams, they weren’t helpful for this first-quarter review. So they went over outlines, ones bought in bookstores, trying to unravel the principles that they’d come across.

At the very end they disintegrated again into talking about themselves, how they felt about the practice exam, how they felt about law school. Mairin said that she was nervous. The others agreed. They didn’t have long to wait for the exam.

They gathered together the next evening, in a small knot outside the classroom. They small-talked. They paced. Then it was time to write. Mairin looked at the first question and re-read it two and then three times. It was about some property that was to be sold. There was no written material to go along with it, just a statement that the parties had made a specific agreement and now one party wanted to change the terms. Mairin felt perplexed. Somehow whatever she’d been studying as contracts didn’t bear any relationship to the question in front of her. She felt herself thinking of "fairness," a non-legal approach to the differences of opinion among people. Had she learned anything legal during this fall quarter? Slowly, the terms and concepts that the group had discussed came back to her. She saw that a few of them might apply, and constructed an answer.

The second and third questions were much the same in that Mairin kept wanting to answer them from her non-legal experience. What is it I’m supposed to have learned, she kept asking herself. She finished, checked over her paper and left. No one from the group was outside, so she went on home, but the few comments she’d overheard told her that her puzzlement was not unique.

Later that week was the practice exam in torts. The torts exam was easier somehow, less theoretical. Each tort had certain "elements." Either the situations in the practice exam contained the elements and were torts, or they did not contain the elements and were not actionable. Mairin felt a little better after that one. The group had decided to go out drinking after the torts exam. It was Thursday, the last class of the week -- and also the last class before Christmas vacation.

The group met in a bar near the law school. The bartender and waitresses had seen generations of law students come and go. They knew just what to murmur in sympathy about the exams. Mairin was flying, as she always did after an exam. She kept a lid on herself very well through the studying and the exam itself, but she lived just to be able to say, "It’s over!" She was on her second gimlet and enjoying every minute of it.

Karen was almost singing. Mariann was a bit dour. "I don’t think I did very well," she kept saying. Catherine was very quiet. "I keep thinking of better answers," she said. She only stayed until one of her two males came by for her. Laurie looked relieved. "I hope I did okay," she laughed. Of them all, Laurie was the only housewife/mother. She had two small children. It was a mystery to Mairin why Laurie wanted to be a lawyer. She was homey and comfortable. Karen and Mariann were all business, clear to the bone. Laurie was comfortable, like an old shoe.

They had a great time, but since the next day was a work day, they broke up the session early. Mairin walked in, threw her books and the mail on the table, and said to herself, "There’s a world out there! Christmas is next week. What happened to Thanksgiving?" She remembered having studied Thanksgiving Day and the entire weekend. She’d had to work Friday afternoon, which she thought of as reckless disregard for employee rights by the agency. She and Linda had gone out Friday evening, but apart from that, the weekend had been devoted to law.