“Don’t you think most of those kids think too much about who got an A or a B when they were in law school and what that means to an inflated G.P.A. and not enough about the world?” asked Connor irrelevantly.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever referred to any girl I dated as my girlfriend. I think that would freak me out. Even the girl that I dated for two years in college I don’t think I ever referred to her as my girlfriend.”“How would you introduce her?” I asked.“I’m just going to say her name,” he said.”

“You know, sometimes I think this is just not it,” he said, his glasses flashing from the early night’s light. He turned toward me in a thoughtful pause.“You know what I mean, Tom?” he asked. “It’s just not.”

“It was a generation growing in its disillusionment about the deepening recession and the backroom handshakes and greedy deals for private little pots of gold that created the largest financial meltdown since the Great Depression. As heirs to the throne, we all knew, of course, how bad the economy was, and our dreams, the ones we were told were all right to dream, were teetering gradually toward disintegration. However, on that night, everyone seemed physically at ease and exempt from life’s worries with final exams over and bar class a distant dream with a week before the first lecture, and as I looked around at the jubilant faces and loud voices, if you listened carefully enough you could almost hear the culmination of three years in the breath of the night gasp in an exultant sigh as if to say, “Law school was over at last!”

“She loves swimming,” said Ellen, who I knew had been a competitive swimmer in college. Ellen looked in the rearview mirror at Kara.“Don’t you Kara?” asked Ellen.There was no response. “I didn’t start until I was three,” said Ellen. “She’s got a two year start on me.”

“I remember when I was twenty-five,” he said. “No client comes to you when you’re twenty-five. It’s like when you are looking for a doctor. You don’t want the new one that just graduated. You don’t want the very old one, the one shaking, the one twenty years past his prime. You want the seasoned one who has done it so many times he can do it in his sleep though. Same thing with attorneys.”

“Look, girls know when they’re cute,” he said. “You don’t have to tell them. All they need to do is look in the mirror. I have one friend out in New York, an attorney. She moved out there after the school year to take the bar. She doesn’t have a job. I was like, ‘How are you going to get a job there in this market?’ And she’s like, ‘I’ll wink and I’ll smile.’ She’s a pretty girl. Whether that works despite her poor grades is yet to be seen.”