Perhaps I am stating the obvious: There is a law that applies to friendship between women. It is unwritten, unacknowleged and perhaps subliminal, but an immutable law nonetheless. The law states that in order for two women to successfully bond as friends, they must have precisely equal physical attributes.

One can not look better than the other in the eyes of the opposite sex--in the eyes of God for that matter. I'm not sure why, but maybe it's about the need to eliminate tension by cancelling out any competitive advantages.

And it's not to say they have to look the same. One could be voluptuous, and the other leggy and tall, but the quotient that measures the sexual impact that each might make has to be exactly the same number. It's a calculation that women make instinctively and instantaneously upon meeting when all the factors are crunched into the equation--age, fashion sense, hair, makeup, along with other factors unknown to, and too suble for a male observer like me. But make no mistake the outcome of this calculation is vital and makes the relationship live or die from the very first moment. And this point, which I hope is not too much belabored here, explains exactly why Silvia felt an instant level of comfort when she sat down in her soft placeigned seat on the train next to Karen.

There had been a bit of a rush for Sylvia to arrive in time for the southbound Super Chief leaving Chicago's Union Station at 3:15 that afternoon.

But the harried feeling quickly dissippated as she settled into the large chair next to Karen, who seemed quite serene as she perused a magazine next to the big window in the bright afternoon light.

Sylvia felt immediately that the train--yes, taking the train had been a good idea. The train soon began it's smooth momentum southward and the two strangers began to talk. Sylvia is a fiber artist, a designer of tapestries and fabric leaving Chicago on this day to meet with decorators who were doing a new hotel in Sante Fe.

She was in this chapter of her life as they say "estranged" from her husband. It has to be said that being pigeonholed in the category "estranged" bothered here no end, because the term didn't begin to envelope the unique complexity of all that the separation represented. It had been quite some time now that she had been living on her own on the near South Side, and she had gotten past the stage where the matter involved just the tangle between the two personalities. It had become very much a personal thing, really, about herself only that she had come to be mulling over. There was this gap somehow between the the life of her mind--her dreams and fantasies--and the day to day real world that she knew. Her daily life was not stultifing to the contrary, it was stimulating and challenging, yet she felt enclosed by it as if her own conventionality was holding her back from the life of her dreams.

There was more. She knew there must be more.

All of this was in the back of her mind as she chatted amiably with Karen, the train rolling through the picturesque south suburbs of Chicago. Autohor's note: The next chapter of this will appear next Sunday.