She looks like an early-30’s back-to-graduate-school Bank Street kind of girl. No make-up, hair roughly pulled back into a ponytail, art-nerd glasses a watery, translucent lettuce green. She has a xeroxed coursepack article on BF Skinner balanced in one hand, earnest notes scribbled in the margins. She is determinedly clutching an orange highlighter and the subway pole with the other hand.

She is not the first woman you would notice at a party. Not the second one, or even the third, probably. She is not tall, elegant, sleek. But her face, as she concentrates on the words on the swaying train, could be home for someone. It is a face you would come to love, it has a kindness you should want to wake up to, take in for a quiet minute before the rumbling and tumult of the day.