The Five-Forty-Eight is a short story written by John Cheever about a man named Blake who first sees a woman as she is getting out of an elevator and follows him from his office down to Madison Avenue in New York City. This same woman has been hired several weeks later as his secretary but after he had slept with her (and cheats on his wife) and finds out that she has horrible handwriting, he fires her. A few weeks later, Blake sees this woman again on the underground train going home, but the woman, Ms.Dent, is not the same as she was when he last saw her. She explains to him that she has been in the hospital for 3 weeks and that the doctors were not trying to cure her, just trying to help her escape herself, which was clearly not what she