There was a time when Americans thought they understood class. The upper crust vacationed in Europe and worshiped an Episcopal God. The middle class drove Ford Fairlanes, settled the San Fernando Valley and enlisted as company men. The working class belonged to the A.F.L.-C.I.O., voted Democratic and did not take cruises to the Caribbean.

Today, the country has gone a long way toward an appearance of classlessness. Americans of all sorts are awash in luxuries that would have dazzled their grandparents. Social diversity has erased many of the old markers. It has become harder to read people's status in the clothes they wear, the cars they drive, the votes they cast, the god they worship, the color of their skin. The contours of class have blurred; some say they have disappeared.

But class is still a powerful force in American life. Over the past three decades, it has come to play a greater, not lesser, role in important ways. At a time when education matters more than ever, success in school remains linked tightly to class. At a time when the country is increasingly integrated racially, the rich are isolating themselves more and more. At a time of extraordinary advances in medicine, class differences in health and lifespan are wide and appear to be widening.

And new research on mobility, the movement of families up and down the economic ladder, shows there is far less of it than economists once thought and less than most people believe. [Click here for more information on income mobility.] In fact, mobility, which once buoyed the working lives of Americans as it rose in the decades after World War II, has lately flattened out or possibly even declined, many researchers say.

Mobility is the promise that lies at the heart of the American dream. It is supposed to take the sting out of the widening gulf between the have-mores and the have-nots. There are poor and rich in the United States, of course, the argument goes; but as long as one can become the other, as long as there is something close to equality of opportunity, the differences between them do not add up to class barriers.

Over the next three weeks, The Times will publish a series of articles on class in America, a dimension of the national experience that tends to go unexamined, if acknowledged at all. With class now seeming more elusive than ever, the articles take stock of its influence in the lives of individuals: a lawyer who rose out of an impoverished Kentucky hollow; an unemployed metal worker in Spokane, Wash., regretting his decision to skip college; a multimillionaire in Nantucket, Mass., musing over the cachet of his 200-foot yacht.

The series does not purport to be all-inclusive or the last word on class. It offers no nifty formulas for pigeonholing people or decoding folkways and manners. Instead, it represents an inquiry into class as Americans encounter it: indistinct, ambiguous, the half-seen hand that upon closer examination holds some Americans down while giving others a boost.

The trends are broad and seemingly contradictory: the blurring of the landscape of class and the simultaneous hardening of certain class lines; the rise in standards of living while most people remain moored in their relative places.

Even as mobility seems to have stagnated, the ranks of the elite are opening. Today, anyone may have a shot at becoming a United States Supreme Court justice or a C.E.O., and there are more and more self-made billionaires. Only 37 members of last year's Forbes 400, a list of the richest Americans, inherited their wealth, down from almost 200 in the mid-1980's.

So it appears that while it is easier for a few high achievers to scale the summits of wealth, for many others it has become harder to move up from one economic class to another. Americans are arguably more likely than they were 30 years ago to end up in the class into which they were born.

A paradox lies at the heart of this new American meritocracy. Merit has replaced the old system of inherited privilege, in which parents to the manner born handed down the manor to their children. But merit, it turns out, is at least partly class-based. Parents with money, education and connections cultivate in their children the habits that the meritocracy rewards. When their children then succeed, their success is seen as earned.

The scramble to scoop up a house in the best school district, channel a child into the right preschool program or land the best medical specialist are all part of a quiet contest among social groups that the affluent and educated are winning in a rout.

"The old system of hereditary barriers and clubby barriers has pretty much vanished," said Eric Wanner, president of the Russell Sage Foundation, a social science research group in New York City that recently published a series of studies on the social effects of economic inequality.

In place of the old system, Dr. Wanner said, have arisen "new ways of transmitting advantage that are beginning to assert themselves."

Faith in the System

Most Americans remain upbeat about their prospects for getting ahead. A recent New York Times poll on class found that 40 percent of Americans believed that the chance of moving up from one class to another had risen over the last 30 years, a period in which the new research shows that it has not. Thirty-five percent said it had not changed, and only 23 percent said it had dropped.

More Americans than 20 years ago believe it possible to start out poor, work hard and become rich. They say hard work and a good education are more important to getting ahead than connections or a wealthy background.

"I think the system is as fair as you can make it," Ernie Frazier, a 65-year-old real estate investor in Houston, said in an interview after participating in the poll. "I don't think life is necessarily fair. But if you persevere, you can overcome adversity. It has to do with a person's willingness to work hard, and I think it's always been that way."

Most say their standard of living is better than their parents' and imagine that their children will do better still. Even families making less than $30,000 a year subscribe to the American dream; more than half say they have achieved it or will do so.

But most do not see a level playing field. They say the very rich have too much power, and they favor the idea of class-based affirmative action to help those at the bottom. Even so, most say they oppose the government's taxing the assets a person leaves at death.

"They call it the land of opportunity, and I don't think that's changed much," said Diana Lackey, a 60-year-old homemaker and wife of a retired contractor in Fulton, N.Y., near Syracuse. "Times are much, much harder with all the downsizing, but we're still a wonderful country."

The Attributes of Class

One difficulty in talking about class is that the word means different things to different people. Class is rank, it is tribe, it is culture and taste. It is attitudes and assumptions, a source of identity, a system of exclusion. To some, it is just money. It is an accident of birth that can influence the outcome of a life. Some Americans barely notice it; others feel its weight in powerful ways.

At its most basic, class is one way societies sort themselves out. Even societies built on the idea of eliminating class have had stark differences in rank. Classes are groups of people of similar economic and social position; people who, for that reason, may share political attitudes, lifestyles, consumption patterns, cultural interests and opportunities to get ahead. Put 10 people in a room and a pecking order soon emerges.

When societies were simpler, the class landscape was easier to read. Marx divided 19th-century societies into just two classes; Max Weber added a few more. As societies grew increasingly complex, the old classes became more heterogeneous. As some sociologists and marketing consultants see it, the commonly accepted big three - the upper, middle and working classes - have broken down into dozens of microclasses, defined by occupations or lifestyles.

A few sociologists go so far as to say that social complexity has made the concept of class meaningless. Conventional big classes have become so diverse - in income, lifestyle, political views - that they have ceased to be classes at all, said Paul W. Kingston, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia. To him, American society is a "ladder with lots and lots of rungs."

"There is not one decisive break saying that the people below this all have this common experience," Professor Kingston said. "Each step is equal-sized. Sure, for the people higher up this ladder, their kids are more apt to get more education, better health insurance. But that doesn't mean there are classes."

Many other researchers disagree. "Class awareness and the class language is receding at the very moment that class has reorganized American society," said Michael Hout, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. "I find these 'end of class' discussions naïve and ironic, because we are at a time of booming inequality and this massive reorganization of where we live and how we feel, even in the dynamics of our politics. Yet people say, 'Well, the era of class is over.' "

One way to think of a person's position in society is to imagine a hand of cards. Everyone is dealt four cards, one from each suit: education, income, occupation and wealth, the four commonly used criteria for gauging class. [Click here to see where you fit in the American population.] Face cards in a few categories may land a player in the upper middle class. At first, a person's class is his parents' class. Later, he may pick up a new hand of his own; it is likely to resemble that of his parents, but not always.

Bill Clinton traded in a hand of low cards with the help of a college education and a Rhodes scholarship and emerged decades later with four face cards. Bill Gates, who started off squarely in the upper middle class, made a fortune without finishing college, drawing three aces.

Many Americans say that they too have moved up the nation's class ladder. In the Times poll, 45 percent of respondents said they were in a higher class than when they grew up, while just 16 percent said they were in a lower one. Over all, 1 percent described themselves as upper class, 15 percent as upper middle class, 42 percent as middle, 35 percent as working and 7 percent as lower.

"I grew up very poor and so did my husband," said Wanda Brown, the 58-year-old wife of a retired planner for the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard who lives in Puyallup, Wash., near Tacoma. "We're not rich but we are comfortable and we are middle class and our son is better off than we are."

The American Ideal

The original exemplar of American social mobility was almost certainly Benjamin Franklin, one of 17 children of a candle maker. About 20 years ago, when researchers first began to study mobility in a rigorous way, Franklin seemed representative of a truly fluid society, in which the rags-to-riches trajectory was the readily achievable ideal, just as the nation's self-image promised.

In a 1987 speech, Gary S. Becker, a University of Chicago economist who would later win a Nobel Prize, summed up the research by saying that mobility in the United States was so high that very little advantage was passed down from one generation to the next. In fact, researchers seemed to agree that the grandchildren of privilege and of poverty would be on nearly equal footing.

If that had been the case, the rise in income inequality beginning in the mid-1970's should not have been all that worrisome. The wealthy might have looked as if they were pulling way ahead, but if families were moving in and out of poverty and prosperity all the time, how much did the gap between the top and bottom matter?

But the initial mobility studies were flawed, economists now say. Some studies relied on children's fuzzy recollections of their parents' income. Others compared single years of income, which fluctuate considerably. Still others misread the normal progress people make as they advance in their careers, like from young lawyer to senior partner, as social mobility.

The new studies of mobility, which methodically track peoples' earnings over decades, have found far less movement. The economic advantage once believed to last only two or three generations is now believed to last closer to five. Mobility happens, just not as rapidly as was once thought.

"We all know stories of poor families in which the next generation did much better," said Gary Solon, a University of Michigan economist who is a leading mobility researcher. "It isn't that poor families have no chance."

But in the past, Professor Solon added, "people would say, 'Don't worry about inequality. The offspring of the poor have chances as good as the chances of the offspring of the rich.' Well, that's not true. It's not respectable in scholarly circles anymore to make that argument."

One study, by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, found that fewer families moved from one quintile, or fifth, of the income ladder to another during the 1980's than during the 1970's and that still fewer moved in the 90's than in the 80's. A study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics also found that mobility declined from the 80's to the 90's.

The incomes of brothers born around 1960 have followed a more similar path than the incomes of brothers born in the late 1940's, researchers at the Chicago Federal Reserve and the University of California, Berkeley, have found. Whatever children inherit from their parents - habits, skills, genes, contacts, money - seems to matter more today.

Studies on mobility over generations are notoriously difficult, because they require researchers to match the earnings records of parents with those of their children. Some economists consider the findings of the new studies murky; it cannot be definitively shown that mobility has fallen during the last generation, they say, only that it has not risen. The data will probably not be conclusive for years.

Nor do people agree on the implications. Liberals say the findings are evidence of the need for better early-education and antipoverty programs to try to redress an imbalance in opportunities. Conservatives tend to assert that mobility remains quite high, even if it has tailed off a little.

But there is broad consensus about what an optimal range of mobility is. It should be high enough for fluid movement between economic levels but not so high that success is barely tied to achievement and seemingly random, economists on both the right and left say.

As Phillip Swagel, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, put it, "We want to give people all the opportunities they want. We want to remove the barriers to upward mobility."

Yet there should remain an incentive for parents to cultivate their children. "Most people are working very hard to transmit their advantages to their children," said David I. Levine, a Berkeley economist and mobility researcher. "And that's quite a good thing."

One surprising finding about mobility is that it is not higher in the United States than in Britain or France. It is lower here than in Canada and some Scandinavian countries but not as low as in developing countries like Brazil, where escape from poverty is so difficult that the lower class is all but frozen in place.

Those comparisons may seem hard to believe. Britain and France had hereditary nobilities; Britain still has a queen. The founding document of the United States proclaims all men to be created equal. The American economy has also grown more quickly than Europe's in recent decades, leaving an impression of boundless opportunity.

But the United States differs from Europe in ways that can gum up the mobility machine. Because income inequality is greater here, there is a wider disparity between what rich and poor parents can invest in their children. Perhaps as a result, a child's economic background is a better predictor of school performance in the United States than in Denmark, the Netherlands or France, one recent study found.

"Being born in the elite in the U.S. gives you a constellation of privileges that very few people in the world have ever experienced," Professor Levine said. "Being born poor in the U.S. gives you disadvantages unlike anything in Western Europe and Japan and Canada."

Blurring the Landscape

Why does it appear that class is fading as a force in American life?

For one thing, it is harder to read position in possessions. Factories in China and elsewhere churn out picture-taking cellphones and other luxuries that are now affordable to almost everyone. Federal deregulation has done the same for plane tickets and long-distance phone calls. Banks, more confident about measuring risk, now extend credit to low-income families, so that owning a home or driving a new car is no longer evidence that someone is middle class.

The economic changes making material goods cheaper have forced businesses to seek out new opportunities so that they now market to groups they once ignored. Cruise ships, years ago a symbol of the high life, have become the ocean-going equivalent of the Jersey Shore. BMW produces a cheaper model with the same insignia. Martha Stewart sells chenille jacquard drapery and scallop-embossed ceramic dinnerware at Kmart.

"The level of material comfort in this country is numbing," said Paul Bellew, executive director for market and industry analysis at General Motors. "You can make a case that the upper half lives as well as the upper 5 percent did 50 years ago."

Like consumption patterns, class alignments in politics have become jumbled. In the 1950's, professionals were reliably Republican; today they lean Democratic. Meanwhile, skilled labor has gone from being heavily Democratic to almost evenly split.

People in both parties have attributed the shift to the rise of social issues, like gun control and same-sex marriage, which have tilted many working-class voters rightward and upper income voters toward the left. But increasing affluence plays an important role, too. When there is not only a chicken, but an organic, free-range chicken, in every pot, the traditional economic appeal to the working class can sound off key.

Religious affiliation, too, is no longer the reliable class marker it once was. The growing economic power of the South has helped lift evangelical Christians into the middle and upper middle classes, just as earlier generations of Roman Catholics moved up in the mid-20th century. It is no longer necessary to switch one's church membership to Episcopal or Presbyterian as proof that one has arrived.

"You go to Charlotte, N.C., and the Baptists are the establishment," said Mark A. Chaves, a sociologist at the University of Arizona. "To imagine that for reasons of respectability, if you lived in North Carolina, you would want to be a Presbyterian rather than a Baptist doesn't play anymore."

The once tight connection between race and class has weakened, too, as many African-Americans have moved into the middle and upper middle classes. Diversity of all sorts - racial, ethnic and gender - has complicated the class picture. And high rates of immigration and immigrant success stories seem to hammer home the point: The rules of advancement have changed.

The American elite, too, is more diverse than it was. The number of corporate chief executives who went to Ivy League colleges has dropped over the past 15 years. There are many more Catholics, Jews and Mormons in the Senate than there were a generation or two ago. Because of the economic earthquakes of the last few decades, a small but growing number of people have shot to the top.

"Anything that creates turbulence creates the opportunity for people to get rich," said Christopher S. Jencks, a professor of social policy at Harvard. "But that isn't necessarily a big influence on the 99 percent of people who are not entrepreneurs."

These success stories reinforce perceptions of mobility, as does cultural myth-making in the form of television programs like "American Idol" and "The Apprentice."

But beneath all that murkiness and flux, some of the same forces have deepened the hidden divisions of class. Globalization and technological change have shuttered factories, killing jobs that were once stepping-stones to the middle class. Now that manual labor can be done in developing countries for $2 a day, skills and education have become more essential than ever.

This has helped produce the extraordinary jump in income inequality. The after-tax income of the top 1 percent of American households jumped 139 percent, to more than $700,000, from 1979 to 2001, according to the Congressional Budget Office, which adjusted its numbers to account for inflation. The income of the middle fifth rose by just 17 percent, to $43,700, and the income of the poorest fifth rose only 9 percent.

For most workers, the only time in the last three decades when the rise in hourly pay beat inflation was during the speculative bubble of the 90's. Reduced pensions have made retirement less secure.

Clearly, a degree from a four-year college makes even more difference than it once did. More people are getting those degrees than did a generation ago, but class still plays a big role in determining who does or does not. At 250 of the most selective colleges in the country, the proportion of students from upper-income families has grown, not shrunk.

Some colleges, worried about the trend, are adopting programs to enroll more lower-income students. One is Amherst, whose president, Anthony W. Marx, explained: "If economic mobility continues to shut down, not only will we be losing the talent and leadership we need, but we will face a risk of a society of alienation and unhappiness. Even the most privileged among us will suffer the consequences of people not believing in the American dream."

Class differences in health, too, are widening, recent research shows. Life expectancy has increased over all; but upper-middle-class Americans live longer and in better health than middle-class Americans, who live longer and in better health than those at the bottom.

Class plays an increased role, too, in determining where and with whom affluent Americans live. More than in the past, they tend to live apart from everyone else, cocooned in their exurban chateaus. Researchers who have studied data from the 1980, 1990 and 2000 censuses say the isolation of the affluent has increased.

Family structure, too, differs increasingly along class lines. The educated and affluent are more likely than others to have their children while married. They have fewer children and have them later, when their earning power is high. On average, according to one study, college-educated women have their first child at 30, up from 25 in the early 1970's. The average age among women who have never gone to college has stayed at about 22.

Those widening differences have left the educated and affluent in a superior position when it comes to investing in their children. "There is no reason to doubt the old saw that the most important decision you make is choosing your parents," said Professor Levine, the Berkeley economist and mobility researcher. "While it's always been important, it's probably a little more important now."

The benefits of the new meritocracy do come at a price. It once seemed that people worked hard and got rich in order to relax, but a new class marker in upper-income families is having at least one parent who works extremely long hours (and often boasts about it). In 1973, one study found, the highest-paid tenth of the country worked fewer hours than the bottom tenth. Today, those at the top work more.

In downtown Manhattan, black cars line up outside Goldman Sachs's headquarters every weeknight around 9. Employees who work that late get a free ride home, and there are plenty of them. Until 1976, a limousine waited at 4:30 p.m. to ferry partners to Grand Central Terminal. But a new management team eliminated the late-afternoon limo to send a message: 4:30 is the middle of the workday, not the end.

A Rags-to-Riches Faith

Will the trends that have reinforced class lines while papering over the distinctions persist?

The economic forces that caused jobs to migrate to low-wage countries are still active. The gaps in pay, education and health have not become a major political issue. The slicing of society's pie is more unequal than it used to be, but most Americans have a bigger piece than they or their parents once did. They appear to accept the tradeoffs.

Faith in mobility, after all, has been consciously woven into the national self-image. Horatio Alger's books have made his name synonymous with rags-to-riches success, but that was not his personal story. He was a second-generation Harvard man, who became a writer only after losing his Unitarian ministry because of allegations of sexual misconduct. Ben Franklin's autobiography was punched up after his death to underscore his rise from obscurity.

The idea of fixed class positions, on the other hand, rubs many the wrong way. Americans have never been comfortable with the notion of a pecking order based on anything other than talent and hard work. Class contradicts their assumptions about the American dream, equal opportunity and the reasons for their own successes and even failures. Americans, constitutionally optimistic, are disinclined to see themselves as stuck.

Blind optimism has its pitfalls. If opportunity is taken for granted, as something that will be there no matter what, then the country is less likely to do the hard work to make it happen. But defiant optimism has its strengths. Without confidence in the possibility of moving up, there would almost certainly be fewer success stories.

Jean G. Miele's heart attack happened on a sidewalk in Midtown Manhattan last May. He was walking back to work along Third Avenue with two colleagues after a several-hundred-dollar sushi lunch. There was the distant rumble of heartburn, the ominous tingle of perspiration. Then Mr. Miele, an architect, collapsed onto a concrete planter in a cold sweat.

Will L. Wilson's heart attack came four days earlier in the bedroom of his brownstone in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. He had been regaling his fiancée with the details of an all-you-can-eat dinner he was beginning to regret. Mr. Wilson, a Consolidated Edison office worker, was feeling a little bloated. He flopped onto the bed. Then came a searing sensation, like a hot iron deep inside his chest.

Ewa Rynczak Gora's first signs of trouble came in her rented room in the noisy shadow of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. It was the Fourth of July. Ms. Gora, a Polish-born housekeeper, was playing bridge. Suddenly she was sweating, stifling an urge to vomit. She told her husband not to call an ambulance; it would cost too much. Instead, she tried a home remedy: salt water, a double dose of hypertension pills and a glass of vodka.

Architect, utility worker, maid: heart attack is the great leveler, and in those first fearful moments, three New Yorkers with little in common faced a single, common threat. But in the months that followed, their experiences diverged. Social class - that elusive combination of income, education, occupation and wealth - played a powerful role in Mr. Miele's, Mr. Wilson's and Ms. Gora's struggles to recover.

Class informed everything from the circumstances of their heart attacks to the emergency care each received, the households they returned to and the jobs they hoped to resume. It shaped their understanding of their illness, the support they got from their families, their relationships with their doctors. It helped define their ability to change their lives and shaped their odds of getting better.

Class is a potent force in health and longevity in the United States. The more education and income people have, the less likely they are to have and die of heart disease, strokes, diabetes and many types of cancer. Upper-middle-class Americans live longer and in better health than middle-class Americans, who live longer and better than those at the bottom. And the gaps are widening, say people who have researched social factors in health.

As advances in medicine and disease prevention have increased life expectancy in the United States, the benefits have disproportionately gone to people with education, money, good jobs and connections. They are almost invariably in the best position to learn new information early, modify their behavior, take advantage of the latest treatments and have the cost covered by insurance.

Many risk factors for chronic diseases are now more common among the less educated than the better educated. Smoking has dropped sharply among the better educated, but not among the less. Physical inactivity is more than twice as common among high school dropouts as among college graduates. Lower-income women are more likely than other women to be overweight, though the pattern among men may be the opposite.

There may also be subtler differences. Some researchers now believe that the stress involved in so-called high-demand, low-control jobs further down the occupational scale is more harmful than the stress of professional jobs that come with greater autonomy and control. Others are studying the health impact of job insecurity, lack of support on the job, and employment that makes it difficult to balance work and family obligations.

Then there is the issue of social networks and support, the differences in the knowledge, time and attention that a person's family and friends are in a position to offer. What is the effect of social isolation? Neighborhood differences have also been studied: How stressful is a neighborhood? Are there safe places to exercise? What are the health effects of discrimination?

Heart attack is a window on the effects of class on health. The risk factors - smoking, poor diet, inactivity, obesity, hypertension, high cholesterol and stress - are all more common among the less educated and less affluent, the same group that research has shown is less likely to receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation, to get emergency room care or to adhere to lifestyle changes after heart attacks.

"In the last 20 years, there have been enormous advances in rescuing patients with heart attack and in knowledge about how to prevent heart attack," said Ichiro Kawachi, a professor of social epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. "It's like diffusion of innovation: whenever innovation comes along, the well-to-do are much quicker at adopting it. On the lower end, various disadvantages have piled onto the poor. Diet has gotten worse. There's a lot more work stress. People have less time, if they're poor, to devote to health maintenance behaviors when they are juggling two jobs. Mortality rates even among the poor are coming down, but the rate is not anywhere near as fast as for the well-to-do. So the gap has increased."

Bruce G. Link, a professor of epidemiology and sociomedical sciences at Columbia University, said of the double-edged consequences of progress: "We're creating disparities. It's almost as if it's transforming health, which used to be like fate, into a commodity. Like the distribution of BMW's or goat cheese."

The Best of Care

Mr. Miele's advantage began with the people he was with on May 6, when the lining of his right coronary artery ruptured, cutting off the flow of blood to his 66-year-old heart. His two colleagues were knowledgeable enough to dismiss his request for a taxi and call an ambulance instead.

And because he was in Midtown Manhattan, there were major medical centers nearby, all licensed to do the latest in emergency cardiac care. The emergency medical technician in the ambulance offered Mr. Miele (pronounced MEE-lee) a choice. He picked Tisch Hospital, part of New York University Medical Center, an academic center with relatively affluent patients, and passed up Bellevue, a city-run hospital with one of the busiest emergency rooms in New York.

Within minutes, Mr. Miele was on a table in the cardiac catheterization laboratory, awaiting an angioplasty to unclog his artery - a procedure that many cardiologists say has become the gold standard in heart attack treatment. When he developed ventricular fibrillation, a heart rhythm abnormality that can be fatal within minutes, the problem was quickly fixed.

Then Dr. James N. Slater, a 54-year-old cardiologist with some 25,000 cardiac catheterizations under his belt, threaded a catheter through a small incision in the top of Mr. Miele's right thigh and steered it toward his heart. Mr. Miele lay on the table, thinking about dying. By 3:52 p.m., less than two hours after Mr. Miele's first symptoms, his artery was reopened and Dr. Slater implanted a stent to keep it that way.

Time is muscle, as cardiologists say. The damage to Mr. Miele's heart was minimal.

Mr. Miele spent just two days in the hospital. His brother-in-law, a surgeon, suggested a few specialists. Mr. Miele's brother, Joel, chairman of the board of another hospital, asked his hospital's president to call N.Y.U. "Professional courtesy," Joel Miele explained later. "The bottom line is that someone from management would have called patient care and said, 'Look, would you make sure everything's O.K.?' "

Things went less flawlessly for Mr. Wilson, a 53-year-old transportation coordinator for Con Ed. He imagined fleetingly that he was having a bad case of indigestion, though he had had a heart attack before. His fiancée insisted on calling an ambulance. Again, the emergency medical technician offered a choice of two nearby hospitals - neither of which had state permission to do an angioplasty, the procedure Mr. Miele received.

Mr. Wilson chose the Brooklyn Hospital Center over Woodhull Medical and Mental Health Center, the city-run hospital that serves three of Brooklyn's poorest neighborhoods. At Brooklyn Hospital, he was given a drug to break up the clot blocking an artery to his heart. It worked at first, said Narinder P. Bhalla, the hospital's chief of cardiology, but the clot re-formed.

So Dr. Bhalla had Mr. Wilson taken to the Weill Cornell Center of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan the next morning. There, Dr. Bhalla performed an angioplasty and implanted a stent. Asked later whether Mr. Wilson would have been better off if he had had his heart attack elsewhere, Dr. Bhalla said the most important issue in heart attack treatment was getting the patient to a hospital quickly.

But he added, "In his case, yes, he would have been better off had he been to a hospital that was doing angioplasty."

Mr. Wilson spent five days in the hospital before heading home on many of the same high-priced drugs that Mr. Miele would be taking and under similar instructions to change his diet and exercise regularly. After his first heart attack in 2000, he quit smoking; but once he was feeling better, he had stopped taking several medications, drifted back to red meat and fried foods, and let his exercise program slip.

This time would be different, he vowed: "I don't think I'll survive another one."

Ms. Gora's experience was the rockiest. First, she hesitated before allowing her husband to call an ambulance; she hoped her symptoms would go away. He finally insisted; but when the ambulance arrived, she resisted leaving. The emergency medical technician had to talk her into going. She was given no choice of hospitals; she was simply taken to Woodhull, the city hospital Mr. Wilson had rejected.

Woodhull was busy when Ms. Gora arrived around 10:30 p.m. A triage nurse found her condition stable and classified her as "high priority." Two hours later, a physician assistant and an attending doctor examined her again and found her complaining of chest pain, shortness of breath and heart palpitations. Over the next few hours, tests confirmed she was having a heart attack.

She was given drugs to stop her blood from clotting and to control her blood pressure, treatment that Woodhull officials say is standard for the type of heart attack she was having. The heart attack passed. The next day, Ms. Gora was transferred to Bellevue, the hospital Mr. Miele had turned down, for an angiogram to assess her risk of a second heart attack.

But Ms. Gora, who was 59 at the time, came down with a fever at Bellevue, so the angiogram had to be canceled. She remained at Bellevue for two weeks, being treated for an infection. Finally, she was sent home. No angiogram was ever done.

Comforts and Risks

Mr. Miele is a member of New York City's upper middle class. The son of an architect and an artist, he worked his way through college, driving an ice cream truck and upholstering theater seats. He spent two years in the military and then joined his father's firm, where he built a practice as not only an architect but also an arbitrator and an expert witness, developing real estate on the side.

Mr. Miele is the kind of person who makes things happen. He bought a $21,000 house in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, sold it about 15 years later for $285,000 and used the money to build his current house next door, worth over $2 million. In Brookhaven, on Long Island, he took a derelict house on a single acre, annexed several adjoining lots and created what is now a four-acre, three-house compound with an undulating lawn and a 15,000-square-foot greenhouse he uses as a workshop for his collection of vintage Jaguars.

Mr. Miele's architecture partners occasionally joked that he was not in the business for the money, which to some extent was true. He had figured out how to live like a millionaire, he liked to say, even before he became one. He had worked four-day weeks for the last 20 years, spending long weekends with his family, sailing or iceboating on Bellport Bay and rebuilding cars.

Mr. Miele had never thought of himself as a candidate for a heart attack - even though both his parents had died of heart disease; even though his brother had had arteries unclogged; even though he himself was on hypertension medication, his cholesterol levels bordered on high and his doctor had been suggesting he lose weight.

He was a passionate chef who put great store in the healthfulness of fresh ingredients from the Mieles' vegetable garden or the greengrocers in Park Slope. His breakfasts may have been a cardiologist's nightmare - eggs, sausage, bacon, pastina with a poached egg - but he considered his marinara sauce to be healthy perfection: just garlic, oil, tomatoes, salt and pepper.

He figured he had something else working in his favor: he was happy. He adored his second wife, Lori, 23 years younger, and their 6-year-old daughter, Emma. He lived within blocks of his two sisters and two of his three grown children from his first marriage. The house regularly overflowed with guests, including Mr. Miele's former wife and her husband. He seemed to know half the people of Park Slope.

"I walk down the street and I feel good about it every day," Mr. Miele, a gregarious figure with twinkling blue eyes and a taste for worn T-shirts and jeans, said of his neighborhood. "And, yes, that gives me a feeling of well-being."

His approach to his health was utilitarian. When body parts broke, he got them fixed so he could keep doing what he liked to do. So he had had disc surgery, rotator cuff surgery, surgery for a carpal tunnel problem. But he was also not above an occasional bit of neglect. In March 2004, his doctor suggested a stress test after Mr. Miele complained of shortness of breath. On May 6, the prescription was still hanging on the kitchen cabinet door.

An important link in the safety net that caught Mr. Miele was his wife, a former executive at a sweater manufacturing company who had stopped work to raise Emma but managed the Mieles' real estate as well. While Mr. Miele was still in the hospital, she was on the Internet, Googling stents.

She scheduled his medical appointments. She got his prescriptions filled. Leaving him at home one afternoon, she taped his cardiologist's business card to the couch where he was sitting. "Call Dr. Hayes and let him know you're coughing," she said, her fingertips on his shoulder. Thirty minutes later, she called home to check.

She prodded Mr. Miele, gently, to cut his weekly egg consumption to two, from seven. She found fresh whole wheat pasta and cooked it with turkey sausage and broccoli rabe. She knew her way around nutrition labels.

Ms. Miele took on the burden of dealing with the hospital and insurance companies. She accompanied Mr. Miele to his doctor's appointments and retained pharmaceutical dosages in her head.

"I can just leave and she can give you all the answers to all the questions," Mr. Miele said to his cardiologist, Dr. Richard M. Hayes, one day.

"O.K., why don't you just leave?" Dr. Hayes said back. "Can she also examine you?"

With his wife's support, Mr. Miele set out to lose 30 pounds. His pasta consumption plunged to a plate a week from two a day. It was not hard to eat healthfully from the Mieles' kitchens. Even the "junk drawer" in Park Slope was stocked with things like banana chips and sugared almonds. Lunches in Brookhaven went straight from garden to table: tomatoes with basil, eggplant, corn, zucchini flower tempura.

At Dr. Hayes's suggestion, Mr. Miele enrolled in a three-month monitored exercise program for heart disease patients, called cardiac rehab, which has been shown to reduce the mortality rate among heart patients by 20 percent. Mr. Miele's insurance covered the cost. He even managed to minimize the inconvenience, finding a class 10 minutes from his country house.

He had the luxury of not having to rush back to work. By early June, he had decided he would take the summer off, and maybe cut back his work week when he returned to the firm.

"You know, the more I think about it, the less I like the idea of going back to work," he said. "I don't see any real advantage. I mean, there's money. But you've got to take the money out of the equation."

So he put a new top on his 1964 Corvair. He played host to a large family reunion, replaced the heat exchanger in his boat and transformed the ramshackle greenhouse into an elaborate workshop. His weight dropped to 189 pounds, from 211. He had doubled the intensity of his workouts. His blood pressure was lower than ever.

Mr. Miele saw Dr. Hayes only twice in six months, for routine follow-ups. He had been known to walk out of doctors' offices if he was not seen within 20 minutes, but Dr. Hayes did not keep him waiting. The Mieles were swept into the examining room at the appointed hour. Buoyed by the evidence of Mr. Miele's recovery, they would head out to lunch in downtown Manhattan. Those afternoons had the feel of impromptu dates.

"My wife tells me that I'm doing 14-hour days," Mr. Miele mused one afternoon, slicing cold chicken and piling it with fresh tomatoes on toast. "She said, 'You're doing better now than you did 10 years ago.' And I said, 'I haven't had sex in a week.' And she said, 'Well?' "

Just one unpleasant thing happened. Mr. Miele's partners informed him in late July that they wanted him to retire. It caught him off guard, and it hurt. He countered by taking the position that he was officially disabled and therefore entitled to be paid through May 5, 2005. "I mean, the guy has a heart attack," he said later. "So you get him while he's down?"

Lukewarm Efforts to Reform

Will Wilson fits squarely in the city's middle class. His parents had been sharecroppers who moved north and became a machinist and a nurse. He grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant and had spent 34 years at Con Ed. He had an income of $73,000, five weeks' vacation, health benefits, a house worth $450,000 and plans to retire to North Carolina at 55.

Mr. Wilson, too, had imagined becoming an architect. But there had been no money for college, so he found a job as a utility worker. By age 22, he had two children. He considered going back to school, with the company's support, to study engineering. But doing shift work, and with small children, he never found the time.

For years he was a high-voltage cable splicer, a job he loved because it meant working outdoors with plenty of freedom and overtime pay. But on a snowy night in the early 1980's, a car skidded into a stanchion, which hit him in the back. A doctor suggested that Mr. Wilson learn to live with the pain instead of having disc surgery, as Mr. Miele had done.

So Mr. Wilson became a laboratory technician, then a transportation coordinator, working in a cubicle in a low-slung building in Astoria, Queens, overseeing fuel deliveries for the company's fleet. Some people might think of the work as tedious, Mr. Wilson said, "but it keeps you busy."

"Sometimes you look back over your past life experiences and you realize that if you would have done something different, you would have been someplace else," he said. "I don't dwell on it too much because I'm not in a negative position. But you do say, 'Well, dag, man, I should have done this or that.' "

Mr. Wilson's health was not bad, but far from perfect. He had quit drinking and smoking, but had high cholesterol, hypertension and diabetes. He was slim, 5-foot-9 and just under 170 pounds. He traced his first heart attack to his smoking, his diet and the stress from a grueling divorce.

His earlier efforts to reform his eating habits were half-hearted. Once he felt better, he stopped taking his cholesterol and hypertension drugs. When his cardiologist moved and referred Mr. Wilson to another doctor, he was annoyed by what he considered the rudeness of the office staff. Instead of demanding courtesy or finding another specialist, Mr. Wilson stopped going.

By the time Dr. Bhalla encountered Mr. Wilson at Brooklyn Hospital, there was damage to all three main areas of his heart. Dr. Bhalla prescribed a half-dozen drugs to lower Mr. Wilson's cholesterol, prevent clotting and control his blood pressure.

"He has to behave himself," Dr. Bhalla said. "He needs to be more compliant with his medications. He has to really go on a diet, which is grains, no red meat, no fat. No fat at all."

Mr. Wilson had grown up eating his mother's fried chicken, pork chops and macaroni and cheese. He confronted those same foods at holiday parties and big events. There were doughnut shops and fried chicken places in his neighborhood; but Mr. Wilson's fiancée, Melvina Murrell Green, found it hard to find fresh produce and good fish.

"People in my circle, they don't look at food as, you know, too much fat in it," Mr. Wilson said. "I don't think it's going to change. It's custom."

At Red Lobster after his second heart attack, Ms. Green would order chicken and Mr. Wilson would have salmon - plus a side order of fried shrimp. "He's still having a problem with the fried seafood," Ms. Green reported sympathetically.

Whole grains remained mysterious. "That we've got to work on," she said. "Well, we recently bought a bag of grain something. I'm not used to that. We try to put it on the cereal. It's O.K."

In August, Ms. Green's blood pressure shot up. The culprit turned out to be a turkey chili recipe that she and Mr. Wilson had discovered: every ingredient except the turkey came from a can. She was shocked when her doctor pointed out the salt content. The Con Ed cafeteria, too, was problematic. So Mr. Wilson began driving to the Best Yet Market in Astoria at lunch to troll the salad bar.

Dr. Bhalla had suggested that Mr. Wilson walk for exercise. There was little open space in the neighborhood, so Mr. Wilson and Ms. Green often drove just to go for a stroll. In mid-October he entered a cardiac rehab program like Mr. Miele's, only less convenient. He would drive into Manhattan after work, during the afternoon rush, three days a week. He would hunt for on-street parking or pay too much for a space in a lot. Then a stranger threatened to damage Mr. Wilson's car in a confrontation over a free spot, so Mr. Wilson switched to the subway.

For a time, he considered applying for permanent disability. But Con Ed allowed him to return to work "on restrictions," so he decided to go back, with plans to retire in a year and a half. The week before he went back, he and Ms. Green took a seven-day cruise to Nassau. It was a revelation.

"Sort of like helped me to see there's a lot more things to do in life," he said. "I think a lot of people deny themselves certain things in life, in terms of putting things off, 'I'll do it later.' Later may never come."

Ignoring the Risks

Ms. Gora is a member of the working class. A bus driver's daughter, she arrived in New York City from Krakow in the early 1990's, leaving behind a grown son. She worked as a housekeeper in a residence for the elderly in Manhattan, making beds and cleaning toilets. She said her annual income was $21,000 to $23,000 a year, with health insurance through her union.

For $365 a month, she rented a room in a friend's Brooklyn apartment on a street lined with aluminum-sided row houses and American flags. She used the friend's bathroom and kitchen. She was in her seventh year on a waiting list for a subsidized one-bedroom apartment in the adjacent Williamsburg neighborhood. In the meantime, she had acquired a roommate: Edward Gora, an asbestos-removal worker newly arrived from Poland and 10 years her junior, whom she met and married in 2003.

Like Mr. Miele, Ms. Gora had never imagined she was at risk of a heart attack, though she was overweight, hypertensive and a 30-year smoker, and heart attacks had killed her father and sister. She had numerous health problems, which she addressed selectively, getting treated for back pain, ulcers and so on until the treatment became too expensive or inconvenient, or her insurance declined to pay.

"My doctor said, 'Ewa, be careful with cholesterol,' " recalled Ms. Gora, whose vestigial Old World sense of propriety had her dressed in heels and makeup for every visit to Bellevue. "When she said that, I think nothing; I don't care. Because I don't believe this touch me. Or I think she have to say like that because she doctor. Like cigarettes: she doctor, she always told me to stop. And when I got out of the office, lights up."

Ms. Gora had a weakness for the peak of the food pyramid. She grew up on her mother's fried pork chops, spare ribs and meatballs - all cooked with lard - and had become a pizza, hamburger and French fry enthusiast in the United States. Fast food was not only tasty but also affordable. "I eat terrible," she reported cheerily from her bed at Bellevue. "I like grease food and fast food. And cigarettes."

She loved the feeling of a cigarette between her fingers, the rhythmic rise and fall of it to her lips. Using her home computer, she had figured out how to buy Marlboros online for just $2.49 a pack. Her husband smoked, her friends all smoked. Everyone she knew seemed to love tobacco and steak.

Her life was physically demanding. She would rise at 6 a.m. to catch a bus to the subway, change trains three times and arrive at work by 8 a.m. She would make 25 to 30 beds, vacuum, cart out trash. Yet she says she loved her life. "I think America is El Dorado," she said. "Because in Poland now is terrible; very little bit money. Here, I don't have a lot of, but I live normal. I have enough, not for rich life but for normal life."

The precise nature of Ms. Gora's illness was far from clear to her even after two weeks in Bellevue. In her first weeks home, she remained unconvinced that she had had a heart attack. She arrived at the Bellevue cardiology clinic for her first follow-up appointment imagining that whatever procedure had earlier been canceled would then be done, that it would unblock whatever was blocked, and that she would be allowed to return to work.

Jad Swingle, a doctor completing his specialty training in cardiology, led Ms. Gora through the crowded waiting room and into an examining room. She clutched a slip of paper with words she had translated from Polish using her pocket dictionary: "dizzy," "groin," "perspiration." Dr. Swingle asked her questions, speaking slowly. Do you ever get chest discomfort? Do you get short of breath when you walk?

She finally interrupted: "Doctor, I don't know what I have, why I was in hospital. What is this heart attack? I don't know why I have this. What I have to do to not repeat this?"

No one had explained these things, Ms. Gora believed. Or, she wondered, had she not understood? She perched on the examining table, ankles crossed, reduced by the setting to an oversize, obedient child. Dr. Swingle examined her, then said he would answer her questions "in a way you'll understand." He set about explaining heart attacks: the narrowed artery, the blockage, the partial muscle death.

Ms. Gora looked startled.

"My muscle is dead?" she asked.

Dr. Swingle nodded.

What about the procedure that was never done?

"I'm not sure an angiogram would help you," he said. She needed to stop smoking, take her medications, walk for exercise, come back in a month.

"My muscle is still dead?" she asked again, incredulous.

"Once it's dead, it's dead," Dr. Swingle said. "There's no bringing it back to life."

Outside, Ms. Gora tottered toward the subway, 14 blocks away, on pink high-heeled sandals in 89-degree heat. "My thinking is black," she said, uncharacteristically glum. "Now I worry. You know, you have hand? Now I have no finger."

If Mr. Miele's encounters with the health care profession in the first months after his heart attack were occasional and efficient, Ms. Gora's were the opposite. Whereas he saw his cardiologist just twice, Ms. Gora, burdened by complications, saw hers a half-dozen times. Meanwhile, her heart attack seemed to have shaken loose a host of other problems.

A growth on her adrenal gland had turned up on a Bellevue CAT scan, prompting a visit to an endocrinologist. An old knee problem flared up; an orthopedist recommended surgery. An alarming purple rash on her leg led to a trip to a dermatologist. Because of the heart attack, she had been taken off hormone replacement therapy and was constantly sweating. She tore open a toe stepping into a pothole and needed stitches.

Without money or connections, moderate tasks consumed entire days. One cardiology appointment coincided with a downpour that paralyzed the city. Ms. Gora was supposed to be at the hospital laboratory at 8 a.m. to have blood drawn and back at the clinic at 1 p.m. In between, she wanted to meet with her boss about her disability payments. She had a 4 p.m. appointment in Brooklyn for her knee.

So at 7 a.m., she hobbled through the rain to the bus to the subway to another bus to Bellevue. She was waiting outside the laboratory when it opened. Then she took a bus uptown in jammed traffic, changed buses, descended into the subway at Grand Central Terminal, rode to Times Square, found service suspended because of flooding, climbed the stairs to 42nd Street, maneuvered through angry crowds hunting for buses and found another subway line.

She reached her workplace an hour and a half after leaving Bellevue; if she had had the money she could have made the trip in 20 minutes by cab. Her boss was not there. So she returned to Bellevue and waited until 2:35 p.m. for her 1 o'clock appointment. As always, she asked Dr. Swingle to let her return to work. When he insisted she have a stress test first, a receptionist gave her the first available appointment - seven weeks away.

Meanwhile, Ms. Gora was trying to stop smoking. She had quit in the hospital, then returned home to a husband and a neighbor who both smoked. To be helpful, Mr. Gora smoked in the shared kitchen next door. He was gone most of the day, working double shifts. Alone and bored, Ms. Gora started smoking again, then called Bellevue's free smoking cessation program and enrolled.

For the next few months, she trekked regularly to "the smoking department" at Bellevue. A counselor supplied her with nicotine patches and advice, not always easy for her to follow: stay out of the house; stay busy; avoid stress; satisfy oral cravings with, say, candy. The counselor suggested a support group, but Ms. Gora was too ashamed of her English to join. Even so, over time her tobacco craving waned.

There was just one hitch: Ms. Gora was gaining weight.

To avoid smoking, she was eating. Her work had been her exercise and now she could not work. Dr. Swingle suggested cardiac rehab, leaving it up to Ms. Gora to find a program and arrange it. Ms. Gora let it slide. As for her diet, she had vowed to stick to chicken, turkey, lettuce, tomatoes and low-fat cottage cheese. But she got tired of that. She began sneaking cookies when no one was looking - and no one was.

She cooked separate meals for Mr. Gora, who was not inclined to change his eating habits. She made him meatballs with sauce, liver, soup from spare ribs. Then one day in mid-October, she helped herself to one of his fried pork chops, and was soon eating the same meals he was. As an alternative to eating cake while watching television, she turned to pistachios, and then ate a pound in a single sitting.

Cruising the 99 Cent Wonder store in Williamsburg, where the freezers were filled with products like Budget Gourmet Rigatoni with Cream Sauce, she pulled down a small package of pistachios: two and a half servings, 13 grams of fat per serving. "I can eat five of these," she confessed, ignoring the nutrition label. Not servings. Bags.

Heading home after a trying afternoon in the office of the apartment complex in Williamsburg, where the long-awaited apartment seemed perpetually just out of reach, Ms. Gora slipped into a bakery and emerged with a doughnut, her first since her heart attack. She found a park bench where she had once been accustomed to reading and smoking. Working her way through the doughnut, confectioners' sugar snowing onto her chest, she said ruefully, "I miss my cigarette."

She wanted to return to work. She felt uncomfortable depending on Mr. Gora for money. She worried that she was becoming indolent and losing her English. Her disability payments, for which she needed a doctor's letter every month, came to just half her $331 weekly salary. Once, she spent hours searching for the right person at Bellevue to give her a letter, only to be told to come back in two days.

The co-payments on her prescriptions came to about $80 each month. Unnerving computer printouts from the pharmacist began arriving: "Maximum benefit reached." She switched to her husband's health insurance plan. Twice, Bellevue sent bills for impossibly large amounts of money for services her insurance was supposed to cover. Both times she spent hours traveling into Manhattan to the hospital's business office to ask why she had been billed. Both times a clerk listened, made a phone call, said the bill was a mistake and told her to ignore it.

When the stress test was finally done, Dr. Swingle said the results showed she was not well enough to return to full-time work. He gave her permission for part-time work, but her boss said it was out of the question. By November, her weight had climbed to 197 pounds from 185 in July. Her cholesterol levels were stubbornly high and her blood pressure was up, despite drugs for both.

In desperation, Ms. Gora embarked upon a curious, heart-unhealthy diet clipped from a Polish-language newspaper. Day 1: two hardboiled eggs, one steak, one tomato, spinach, lettuce with lemon and olive oil. Another day: coffee, grated carrots, cottage cheese and three containers of yogurt. Yet another: just steak. Ms. Gora decided not to tell Dr. Swingle. "I worry if he don't let me, I not lose the weight," she said.

Uneven Recoveries

By spring, Mr. Miele's heart attack, remarkably, had left him better off. He had lost 34 pounds and was exercising five times a week and taking subway stairs two at a time. He had retired from his firm on the terms he wanted. He was working from home, billing $225 an hour. More money in less time, he said. His blood pressure and cholesterol were low. "You're doing great," Dr. Hayes had said. "You're doing better than 99 percent of my patients."

Mr. Wilson's heart attack had been a setback. His heart function remained impaired, though improved somewhat since May. At one recent checkup, his blood pressure and his weight had been a little high. He still enjoyed fried shrimp on occasion but he took his medications diligently. He graduated from cardiac rehab with plans to join a health club with a pool. And he was looking forward to retirement.

Ms. Gora's life and health were increasingly complex. With Dr. Swingle's reluctant approval, she returned to work in November. She had moved into the apartment in Williamsburg, which gave her a kitchen and a bathroom for the first time in seven years. But she began receiving menacing phone calls from a collection agency about an old bill her health insurance had not covered. Her husband, with double pneumonia, was out of work for weeks.

She had her long-awaited knee surgery in January. But it left her temporarily unable to walk. Her weight hit 200 pounds. When the diet failed, she considered another consisting largely of fruit and vegetables sprinkled with an herbal powder. Her blood pressure and cholesterol remained ominously high. She had been warned that she was now a borderline diabetic.

"You're becoming a full-time patient, aren't you?" Dr. Swingle remarked.

NORTHFIELD, Mass. - When Dan Croteau met Cate Woolner six years ago, he was selling cars at the Keene, N.H., Mitsubishi lot and she was pretending to be a customer, test driving a black Montero while she and her 11-year-old son, Jonah, waited for their car to be serviced.

The test drive lasted an hour and a half. Jonah got to see how the vehicle performed in off-road mud puddles. And Mr. Croteau and Ms. Woolner hit it off so well that she later sent him a note, suggesting that if he was not involved with someone, not a Republican and not an alien life form, maybe they could meet for coffee. Mr. Croteau dithered about the propriety of dating a customer, but when he finally responded, they talked on the phone from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m.

They had a lot in common. Each had two failed marriages and two children. Both love dancing, motorcycles, Bob Dylan, bad puns, liberal politics and National Public Radio.

But when they began dating, they found differences, too. The religious difference - he is Roman Catholic, she is Jewish - posed no problem. The real gap between them, both say, is more subtle: Mr. Croteau comes from the working class, and Ms. Woolner from money.

Mr. Croteau, who will be 50 in June, grew up in Keene, an old mill town in southern New Hampshire. His father was a factory worker whose education ended at the eighth grade; his mother had some factory jobs, too. Mr. Croteau had a difficult childhood and quit school at 16. He then left home, joined the Navy and drifted through a long series of jobs without finding any real calling. He married his pregnant 19-year-old girlfriend and had two daughters, Lael and Maggie, by the time he was 24.

"I was raised in a family where my grandma lived next door, my uncles lived on the next road over, my dad's two brothers lived next to each other, and I pretty much played with my cousins," he said. "The whole concept of life was that you should try to get a good job in the factory. My mother tried to encourage me. She'd say, 'Dan's bright; ask him a question.' But if I'd said I wanted to go to college, it would have been like saying I wanted to grow gills and breathe underwater."

He always felt that the rich people in town, "the ones with their names on the buildings," as he put it, lived in another world.

Ms. Woolner, 54, comes from that other world. The daughter of a doctor and a dancer, she grew up in a comfortable home in Hartsdale, N.Y., with the summer camps, vacations and college education that wealthy Westchester County families can take for granted. She was always uncomfortable with her money; when she came into a modest inheritance at 21, she ignored the monthly bank statements for several years, until she learned to channel her unease into philanthropy benefiting social causes. She was in her mid-30's and married to a psychotherapist when Isaac and Jonah were born.

"My mother's father had a Rolls-Royce and a butler and a second home in Florida," Ms. Woolner said, "and from as far back as I can remember, I was always aware that I had more than other people, and I was uncomfortable about it because it didn't feel fair. When I was little, what I fixated on with my girlfriends was how I had more pajamas than they did. So when I'd go to birthday sleepovers, I'd always take them a pair of pajamas as a present."

Marriages that cross class boundaries may not present as obvious a set of challenges as those that cross the lines of race or nationality. But in a quiet way, people who marry across class lines are also moving outside their comfort zones, into the uncharted territory of partners with a different level of wealth and education, and often, a different set of assumptions about things like manners, food, child-rearing, gift-giving and how to spend vacations. In cross-class marriages, one partner will usually have more money, more options and, almost inevitably, more power in the relationship.

It is not possible to say how many cross-class marriages there are. But to the extent that education serves as a proxy for class, they seem to be declining. Even as more people marry across racial and religious lines, often to partners who match them closely in other respects, fewer are choosing partners with a different level of education. While most of those marriages used to involve men marrying women with less education, studies have found, lately that pattern has flipped, so that by 2000, the majority involved women, like Ms. Woolner, marrying men with less schooling - the combination most likely to end in divorce.

"It's definitely more complicated, given the cultural scripts we've all grown up with," said Ms. Woolner, who has a master's degree in counseling and radiates a thoughtful sincerity. "We've all been taught it's supposed to be the man who has the money and the status and the power."

Bias on Both Sides

When he met Ms. Woolner, Mr. Croteau had recently stopped drinking and was looking to change his life. But when she told him, soon after they began dating, that she had money, it did not land as good news.

"I wished she had waited a little," Mr. Croteau said. "When she told me, my first thought was, uh oh, this is a complication. From that moment I had to begin questioning my motivations. You don't want to feel like a gold digger. You have to tell yourself, here's this person that I love, and here's this quality that comes with the package. Cate's very generous, and she thinks a lot about what's fair and works very hard to level things out, but she also has a lot of baggage around that quality. She has all kinds of choices I don't have. And she does the lion's share of the decision-making."

Before introducing Ms. Woolner to his family, Mr. Croteau warned them about her background. "I said, 'Mom, I want you to know Cate and her family are rich,' " he recalled. "And she said, 'Well, don't hold that against her; she's probably very nice anyway.' I thought that was amazing."

There were biases on the other side too. Just last summer, Mr. Croteau said, when they were at Ms. Woolner's mother's house on Martha's Vineyard, his mother-in-law confessed to him that she had initially been embarrassed that he was a car salesman and worried that her daughter was taking him on as a kind of do-good project.

Still, the relationship moved quickly. Mr. Croteau met Ms. Woolner in the fall of 1998 and moved into her comfortable home in Northfield the next spring, after meeting her condition that he sell his gun.

Even before Mr. Croteau moved in, Ms. Woolner gave him money to buy a new car and pay off some debts. "I wanted to give him the money," she said. "I hadn't sweated it. I told him that this was money that had just come to me for being born into one class, while he was born into another class." And when he lost his job not long after, Ms. Woolner began paying him a monthly stipend - he sometimes refers to it as an allowance - that continued, at a smaller level, until last November, when she quit her longstanding job at a local antipoverty agency. She also agreed to pay for a $10,000 computer course that helped prepare him for his current job as a software analyst at the Cheshire Medical Center in Keene. From the beginning, the balance of power in the relationship was a sufficiently touchy issue that at Ms. Woolner's urging, a few months before their wedding in August 2001, they joined a series of workshops on cross-class relationships.

"I had abject terror at the idea of the group," said Mr. Croteau, who is blunt and intellectually engaging. "It's certainly an upper-class luxury to pay to tell someone your troubles, and with all the problems in the world, it felt a little strange to sit around talking about your relationship. But it was useful. It was a relief to hear people talk about the same kinds of issues we were facing, about who had power in the relationship and how they used it. I think we would have made it anyway, but we would have had a rockier time without the group."

It is still accepted truth within the household that Ms. Woolner's status has given her the upper hand in the marriage. At dinner one night, when her son Isaac said baldly, "I always think of my mom as having the power in the relationship," Mr. Croteau did not flinch. He is fully aware that in this relationship he is the one whose life has been most changed.

Confusing Differences

The Woolner-Croteau household is just up the hill from the groomed fields of Northfield Mount Hermon prep school - a constant local reminder to Mr. Croteau of just how differently his wife's sons and his daughters have been educated. Jonah is now a senior there. Isaac, who also attended the school, is now back at Lewis & Clark College in Oregon after taking a couple of semesters away to study in India and to attend massage school while working in a deli near home.

By contrast, Mr. Croteau's adult daughters - who have never lived with the couple - made their way through the Keene public schools.

"I sometimes think Jonah and Isaac need a dose of reality, that a couple years in public school would have shown them something different," Mr. Croteau said. "On the other hand I sometimes wish I'd been able to give Maggie and Lael what they had. My kids didn't have the same kind of privilege and the same kind of schools. They didn't have teachers concerned about their tender growing egos. It was catch-as-catch-can for them, and that still shows in their personalities."

Mr. Croteau had another experience of Northfield Mount Hermon as well. He briefly had a job as its communications manager, but could not adjust to its culture.

"There were all these Ivy Leaguers," he said. "I didn't understand their nuances, and I didn't make a single friend there. In working-class life, people tell you things directly, they're not subtle. At N.M.H., I didn't get how they did things. When a vendor didn't meet the deadline, I called and said, 'Where's the job?' When he said, 'We bumped you, we'll have it next week,' I said, 'What do you mean, next week? We have a deadline, you can't do business like that.' It got back to my supervisor, who came and said, 'We don't yell at vendors.' The idea seemed to be that there weren't deadlines in that world, just guidelines."

Mr. Croteau says he is far more comfortable at the hospital. "I deal mostly with nurses and other computer nerds and they come from the same kind of world I do, so we know how to talk to each other," he said.

But in dealing with Ms. Woolner's family, especially during the annual visits to Martha's Vineyard, Mr. Croteau said, he sometimes finds himself back in class bewilderment, feeling again that he does not get the nuances. "They're incredibly gracious to me, very well bred and very nice," he said, "so much so that it's hard to tell whether it's sincere, whether they really like you."

Mr. Croteau still seems impressed by his wife's family, and their being among "the ones with their names on the buildings." It is he who shows a visitor the framed print of the old Woolner Distillery in Peoria, Ill., and, describing the pictures on the wall, mentions that this in-law went to Yale, and that one knew Gerald Ford.

Family Divisions

Mr. Croteau and Ms Woolner are not the only ones aware of the class divide within the family; so are the two sets of children.

Money is continually tight for Lael Croteau, 27, who is in graduate school in educational administration at the University of Vermont, and Maggie, 25, who is working three jobs while in her second year of law school at American University. At restaurants, they ask to have the leftovers wrapped to take home.

Neither could imagine taking a semester off to try out massage school, as Isaac did. They are careful about their manners, their plans, their clothes.

"Who's got money, who doesn't, it's always going on in my head," Maggie said. "So I put on the armor. I have the bag. I have the shirt. I know people can't tell my background by looking."

The Croteau daughters are the only ones among 12 first cousins who made it to college. Most of the others married and had babies right after high school.

"They see us as different, and sometimes that can hurt," Maggie said.

The daughters walk a fine line. They are deeply attached to their mother, who did most of their rearing, but they are also attracted to the Woolner world and its possibilities. Through holidays and Vineyard vacations, they have come to feel close not only to their stepbrothers, but also to Ms. Woolner's sisters' children, whose pictures are on display in Lael's house in Vermont. And they see, up close, just how different their upbringing was.

"Jonah and Isaac don't have to worry about how they dress, or whether they'll have the money to finish college, or anything," Lael said. "That's a real luxury. And when one of the little kids asks, 'Why do people sneeze?' their mom will say, 'I don't know; that's a great question. Let's go to the museum, and check it out.' My mom is very smart and certainly engages us on many levels, but when we asked a difficult question, she'd say, 'Because I said so.' "

The daughters' lives have been changed not only by Ms. Woolner's warm, stable presence, but also by her gifts of money for snow tires or books, the family vacations she pays for and her connections. One of Ms. Woolner's cousins, a Washington lawyer, employs Maggie both at her office and as a housesitter.

For Ms. Woolner's sons, Mr. Croteau's arrival did not make nearly as much difference. They are mostly oblivious of the extended Croteau family, and have barely met the Croteau cousins, who are close to their age and live nearby but lead quite different lives. Indeed, in early February, while Ms. Woolner's Isaac was re-adjusting to college life, Mr. Croteau's nephew, another 20-year-old Isaac who had enlisted in the Marines right after high school, was shot in the face in Falluja, Iraq, and shipped to Bethesda Medical Center in Maryland. Isaac and Jonah are easygoing young men, neither of whom has any clear idea what he wants to do in life. "For a while I've been trying to find my passion," Jonah said. "But I haven't been passionately trying to find my passion."

Isaac fantasizes about opening a brewery-cum-performance-space, traveling through South America or operating a sunset massage cruise in the Caribbean. He knows he is on such solid ground that he can afford fantasy.

"I have the most amazing safety net a person could have," he said, "incredible, loving, involved and wealthy parents."

On the rare occasions when they are all together, the daughters get on easily with the sons, though there are occasional tensions. Maggie would love to have a summer internship with a human rights group, but she needs paid work and when she graduates, with more than $100,000 of debt, she will need a law firm job, not one with a nonprofit. So when Isaac one day teased her as being a sellout, she reminded him that it was a lot easier to live your ideals when you did not need to make money to pay for them.

And there are moments when the inequalities within the family are painfully obvious.

"I do feel the awkwardness of helping Isaac buy a car, when I'm not helping them buy a car," Ms. Woolner said of the daughters. "We've talked about that. But I also have to be aware of overstepping. Their mother's house burned down, which was awful for them and for her and I really wanted to help. I took out my checkbook and I didn't know what was appropriate. In the end I wrote a $1,500 check. Emily Post doesn't deal with these situations."

She and Mr. Croteau remain conscious of the class differences between them, and the ways in which their lives have been shaped by different experiences.

On one visit to New York City, where Ms. Woolner's mother lives in the winter, Ms. Woolner lost her debit card and felt anxious about being disconnected, even briefly, from her money.

For Mr. Croteau, it was a strange moment. "She had real discomfort, even though we were around the corner from her mother, and she had enough money to do anything we were likely to do, assuming she wasn't planning to buy a car or a diamond all of a sudden," he said. "So I didn't understand the problem. I know how to walk around without a safety net. I've done it all my life."

Both he and his wife express pride that their marriage has withstood its particular problems and stresses.

"I think we're always both amazed that we're working it out," Ms. Woolner said.

But almost from the beginning they agreed on an approach to their relationship, a motto now engraved inside their wedding rings: "Press on regardless."

PIKEVILLE, Ky. - Della Mae Justice stands before the jury in the Pike County Courthouse, arguing that her client's land in Greasy Creek Hollow was illegally grabbed when the neighbors expanded their cemetery behind her home.

With her soft Appalachian accent, Ms. Justice leaves no doubt that she is a local girl, steeped in the culture of the old family cemeteries that dot the mountains here in East Kentucky. "I grew up in a holler, I surely did," she tells jurors as she lays out the boundary conflict.

Ms. Justice is, indeed, a product of the Appalachian coal-mining country where lush mountains flank rust-colored creeks, the hollows rising so steeply that there is barely room for a house on either side of the creeks. Her family was poor, living for several years in a house without indoor plumbing. Her father was absent; her older half-brother sometimes had to hunt squirrels for the family to eat. Her mother married again when Della was 9. But the stepfather, a truck driver, was frequently on the road, and her mother, who was mentally ill, often needed the young Della to care for her.

Ms. Justice was always hungry for a taste of the world beyond the mountains. Right after high school, she left Pike County, making her way through college and law school, spending time in France, Scotland and Ireland, and beginning a high-powered legal career. In just a few years she moved up the ladder from rural poverty to the high-achieving circles of the middle class.

Now, at 34, she is back home. But her journey has transformed her so thoroughly that she no longer fits in easily. Her change in status has left Ms. Justice a little off balance, seeing the world from two vantage points at the same time: the one she grew up in and the one she occupies now.

Far more than people who remain in the social class they are born to, surrounded by others of the same background, Ms. Justice is sensitive to the cultural significance of the cars people drive, the food they serve at parties, where they go on vacation - all the little clues that indicate social status. By every conventional measure, Ms. Justice is now solidly middle class, but she is still trying to learn how to feel middle class. Almost every time she expresses an idea, or explains herself, she checks whether she is being understood, asking, "Does that make sense?"

"I think class is everything, I really do," she said recently. "When you're poor and from a low socioeconomic group, you don't have a lot of choices in life. To me, being from an upper class is all about confidence. It's knowing you have choices, knowing you set the standards, knowing you have connections."

Broken Ties

In Pikeville, the site of the Hatfield-McCoy feud (Ms. Justice is a Hatfield), memories are long and family roots mean a lot. Despite her success, Ms. Justice worries about what people might remember about her, especially about the time when she was 15 and her life with her mother and stepfather imploded in violence, sending her into foster care for a wretched nine months.

"I was always in the lowest socioeconomic group," she said, "but foster care ratcheted it down another notch. I hate that period of my life, when for nine months I was a child with no family."

While she was in foster care, Ms. Justice lived in one end of a double-wide trailer, with the foster family on the other end. She slept alongside another foster child, who wet the bed, and every morning she chose her clothes from a box of hand-me-downs. She was finally rescued when her father heard about her situation and called his nephew, Joe Justice.

Joe Justice was 35 years older than Della, a successful lawyer who lived in the other Pikeville, one of the well-to-do neighborhoods on the mountain ridges. He and his wife, Virginia, had just built a four-bedroom contemporary home, complete with a swimming pool, on Cedar Gap Ridge.

Joe Justice had never even met his cousin until he saw her in the trailer, but afterward he told his wife that it was "abhorrent" for a close relative to be in foster care. While poverty is common around Pikeville, foster care is something much worse: a sundering of the family ties that count for so much. So Joe and Virginia Justice took Della Mae in. She changed schools, changed address - changed worlds, in effect - and moved into an octagonal bedroom downstairs from the Justices' 2 year-old son.

"The shock of going to live in wealth, with Joe and Virginia, it was like Little Orphan Annie going to live with the Rockefellers," Ms. Justice said. "It was not easy. I was shy and socially inept. For the first time, I could have had the right clothes, but I didn't have any idea what the right clothes were. I didn't know much about the world, and I was always afraid of making a wrong move. When we had a school trip for chorus, we went to a restaurant. I ordered a club sandwich, but when it came with those toothpicks on either end, I didn't know how to eat it, so I just sat there, staring at it and starving, and said I didn't feel well."

Joe and Virginia Justice worried about Della Mae's social unease and her failure to mingle with other young people in their church. But they quickly sensed her intelligence and encouraged her to attend Berea College, a small liberal arts institution in Kentucky that accepts students only from low-income families. Tuition is free and everybody works. For Ms. Justice, as for many other Berea students, the experience of being one among many poor people, all academically capable and encouraged to pursue big dreams, was life-altering.

It was at Berea that Ms. Justice met the man who became her husband, Troy Price, the son of a tobacco farmer with a sixth-grade education. They married after graduation, and when Ms. Justice won a fellowship, the couple went to Europe for a year of independent travel and study. When Ms. Justice won a scholarship to the University of Kentucky law school in Lexington, Mr. Price went with her, to graduate school in family studies.

After graduating fifth in her law school class, Ms. Justice clerked for a federal judge, then joined Lexington's largest law firm, where she put in long hours in hopes of making partner. She and her husband bought a townhouse, took trips, ate in restaurants almost every night and spent many Sunday afternoons at real estate open houses in Lexington's elegant older neighborhoods. By all appearances, they were on the fast track.

But Ms. Justice still felt like an outsider. Her co-editors on the law review, her fellow clerks at the court and her colleagues at the law firm all seemed to have a universe of information that had passed her by. She saw it in matters big and small - the casual references, to Che Guevara or Mount Vesuvius, that meant nothing to her; the food at dinner parties that she would not eat because it looked raw in the middle.

"I couldn't play Trivial Pursuit, because I had no general knowledge of the world," she said. "And while I knew East Kentucky, they all knew a whole lot about Massachusetts and the Northeast. They all knew who was important, whose father was a federal judge. They never doubted that they had the right thing to say. They never worried about anything."

Most of all, they all had connections that fed into a huge web of people with power. "Somehow, they all just knew each other," she said.

Knitting a New Family

Ms. Justice's life took an abrupt turn in 1999, when her half-brother, back in Pike County, called out of the blue to say that his children, Will and Anna Ratliff, who had been living with their mother, were in foster care. Ms. Justice and her brother had not been close, and she had met the children only once or twice, but the call was impossible to ignore. As her cousin Joe had years earlier, she found it intolerable to think of her flesh and blood in foster care.

So over the next year, Della Mae Justice and her husband got custody of both children and went back to Pikeville, only 150 miles away but far removed from their life in Lexington. The move made all kinds of sense. Will and Anna, now 13 and 12, could stay in touch with their mother and father. Mr. Price got a better job, as executive director of Pikeville's new support center for abused children. Ms. Justice went to work for her cousin at his law firm, where a flexible schedule allowed her to look after the two children.

And yet for Ms. Justice the return to Pikeville has been almost as dislocating as moving out of foster care and into that octagonal bedroom all those years ago. On a rare visit recently to the hollows where she used to live, she was moved to tears when a neighbor came out, hugged her and told her how he used to pray and worry for her and how happy he was that she had done so well. But mostly, she winces when reminded of her past.

"Last week, I picked up the phone in my office," she recalled, "and the woman said who she was, and then said, 'You don't remember me, do you?' And I said, 'Were you in foster care with me?' That was crazy. Why would I do that? It's not something I advertise, that I was in care."

While most of her workweek is devoted to commercial law, Ms. Justice spends Mondays in family court, representing families with the kind of problems hers had. She bristles whenever she runs into any hint of class bias, or the presumption that poor people in homes heated by kerosene or without enough bedrooms cannot be good parents.

"The norm is, people that are born with money have money, and people who weren't don't," she said recently. "I know that. I know that just to climb the three inches I have, which I've not gone very far, took all of my effort. I have worked hard since I was a kid and I've done nothing but work to try and pull myself out."

The class a person is born into, she said, is the starting point on the continuum. "If your goal is to become, on a national scale, a very important person, you can't start way back on the continuum, because you have too much to make up in one lifetime. You have to make up the distance you can in your lifetime so that your kids can then make up the distance in their lifetime."

Coming to Terms With Life

Ms. Justice is still not fully at ease in the other, well-to-do Pikeville, and in many ways she and her husband had to start from scratch in finding a niche there. Church is where most people in town find friends and build their social life. But Ms. Justice and Mr. Price had trouble finding a church that was a comfortable fit; they went through five congregations, starting at the Baptist church she had attended as a child and ending up at the Disciples of Christ, an inclusive liberal church with many affluent members. The pastor and his wife, transplants to Kentucky, have become their closest friends. Others have come more slowly.

"Partly the problem is that we're young, for middle-class people, to have kids as old as Will and Anna," Ms. Justice said. "And the fact that we're raising a niece and nephew, that's kind of a flag that we weren't always middle class, just like saying you went to Berea College tells everyone you were poor."

And though in terms of her work Ms. Justice is now one of Pikeville's leading citizens, she is still troubled by the old doubts and insecurities. "My stomach's always in knots getting ready to go to a party, wondering if I'm wearing the right thing, if I'll know what to do," she said. "I'm always thinking: How does everybody else know that? How do they know how to act? Why do they all seem so at ease?"

A lot of her energy now goes into Will and Anna. She wants to bring them up to have the middle-class ease that still eludes her. "Will and Anna know what it's like to be poor, and now we want them to be able to be just regular kids," she said. "When I was young, I always knew who were the kids at school with the involved parents that brought in the cookies, and those were the kids who got chosen for every special thing, not ones like me, who got free lunch and had to borrow clothes from their aunt if there was a chorus performance."

Because Ms. Justice is self-conscious about her teeth - "the East Kentucky overbite," she says ruefully - she made sure early on that Anna got braces. She worries about the children's clothes as much as her own. "Everyone else seems to know when the khaki pants the boys need are on sale at J. C. Penney," she said. "I never know these things."

As a child, Ms. Justice never had the resources for her homework projects. So when Anna was assigned to build a Navajo hogan, they headed to Wal-Mart for supplies.

"We put in extra time, so she would appear like those kids with the involved parents," Ms. Justice said. "I know it's just a hogan, but making a project that looks like the other kids' projects is part of fitting in."

Ms. Justice encouraged Will to join the Boy Scouts, and when he was invited to join his school's Academic Team, which competes in quiz bowls, she insisted that he try it. When he asked her whether he might become a drug addict if he took the medicine prescribed for him, she told him it was an excellent question, and at the doctor's office prompted him to ask the doctor directly. She nudges both children to talk about what happens in school, to recount the plots of the books they read and to discuss current events.

It is this kind of guidance that distinguishes middle-class children from children of working-class and poor families, according to sociologists who have studied how social class affects child-rearing. While working-class parents usually teach their children, early on, to do what they are told without argument and to manage their own free time, middle-class parents tend to play an active role in shaping their children's activities, seeking out extracurricular activities to build their talents, and encouraging them to speak up and even to negotiate with authority figures.

Ms. Justice's efforts are making a difference. Will found that he enjoyed Academic Team. Anna now gets evening phone calls from several friends. Both have begun to have occasional sleepovers. And gradually, Ms. Justice is coming to terms with her own life. On New Year's Eve, after years in a modest rented townhouse, she and her husband moved into a new house that reminds her of the Brady Bunch home. It has four bedrooms and a swimming pool. In a few years, when her older cousin retires, Ms. Justice will most likely take over the practice, a solid prospect, though far less lucrative, and less glamorous, than a partnership at her Lexington law firm.

"I've worked very hard all my life - to have a life that's not so far from where I started out," she said. "It is different, but it's not the magical life I thought I'd get."

For a while last winter, Tim Havens, a recent graduate of Brown University and now an evangelical missionary there, had to lead his morning prayer group in a stairwell of the campus chapel. That was because workers were clattering in to remake the lower floor for a display of American Indian art, and a Buddhist student group was chanting in the small sanctuary upstairs.

Like most of the Ivy League universities, Brown was founded by Protestant ministers as an expressly Christian college. But over the years it gradually shed its religious affiliation and became a secular institution, as did the other Ivies. In addition to Buddhists, the Brown chaplain's office now recognizes "heathen/pagan" as a "faith community."

But these days evangelical students like those in Mr. Havens's prayer group are becoming a conspicuous presence at Brown. Of a student body of 5,700, about 400 participate in one of three evangelical student groups - more than the number of active mainline Protestants, the campus chaplain says. And these students are in the vanguard of a larger social shift not just on campuses but also at golf resorts and in boardrooms; they are part of an expanding beachhead of evangelicals in the American elite.

The growing power and influence of evangelical Christians is manifest everywhere these days, from the best-seller lists to the White House, but in fact their share of the general population has not changed much in half a century. Most pollsters agree that people who identify themselves as white evangelical Christians make up about a quarter of the population, just as they have for decades.

What has changed is the class status of evangelicals. In 1929, the theologian H. Richard Niebuhr described born-again Christianity as the "religion of the disinherited." But over the last 40 years, evangelicals have pulled steadily closer in income and education to mainline Protestants in the historically affluent establishment denominations. In the process they have overturned the old social pecking order in which "Episcopalian," for example, was a code word for upper class, and "fundamentalist" or "evangelical" shorthand for lower.

Evangelical Christians are now increasingly likely to be college graduates and in the top income brackets. Evangelical C.E.O.'s pray together on monthly conference calls, evangelical investment bankers study the Bible over lunch on Wall Street and deep-pocketed evangelical donors gather at golf courses for conferences restricted to those who give more than $200,000 annually to Christian causes.

Their growing wealth and education help explain the new influence of evangelicals in American culture and politics. Their buying power fuels the booming market for Christian books, music and films. Their rising income has paid for construction of vast mega-churches in suburbs across the country. Their charitable contributions finance dozens of mission agencies, religious broadcasters and international service groups.

On The Chronicle of Philanthropy's latest list of the 400 top charities, Campus Crusade for Christ, an evangelical student group, raised more from private donors than the Boy Scouts of America, the Public Broadcasting Service and Easter Seals.

Now a few affluent evangelicals are directing their attention and money at some of the tallest citadels of the secular elite: Ivy League universities. Three years ago a group of evangelical Ivy League alumni formed the Christian Union, an organization intended to "reclaim the Ivy League for Christ," according to its fund-raising materials, and to "shape the hearts and minds of many thousands who graduate from these schools and who become the elites in other American cultural institutions."

The Christian Union has bought and maintains new evangelical student centers at Brown, Princeton and Cornell, and has plans to establish a center on every Ivy League campus. In April, 450 students, alumni and supporters met in Princeton for an "Ivy League Congress on Faith and Action." A keynote speaker was Charles W. Colson, the born-again Watergate felon turned evangelical thinker.

Matt Bennett, founder of the Christian Union, told the conference, "I love these universities - Princeton and all the others, my alma mater, Cornell - but it really grieves me and really hurts me to think of where they are now."

The Christian Union's immediate goal, he said, was to recruit campus missionaries. "What is happening now is good," Mr. Bennett said, "but it is like a finger in the dike of keeping back the flood of immorality."

And trends in the Ivy League today could shape the culture for decades to come, he said. "So many leaders come out of these campuses. Seven of the nine Supreme Court justices are Ivy League grads; four of the seven Massachusetts Supreme Court justices; Christian ministry leaders; so many presidents, as you know; leaders of business - they are everywhere."

He added, "If we are going to change the world, we have got, by God's power, to see these campuses radically changed."

An Outsider on Campus Mr. Havens, who graduated from Brown last year, is the kind of missionary the Christian Union hopes to enlist. An evangelical from what he calls a "solidly middle class" family in the Midwest, he would have been an anomaly at Brown a couple of generations ago. He applied there, he said, out of a sense of "nonconformity" and despite his mother's preference that he attend a Christian college.

"She just was nervous about, and rightfully so, what was going to happen to me freshman year," Mr. Havens recalled.

When he arrived at Brown, in Providence, R.I., Mr. Havens was astounded to find that the biggest campus social event of the fall was the annual SexPowerGod dance, sponsored by the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Queer Alliance and advertised with dining-hall displays depicting pairs of naked men or women. "Why do they have to put God in the name?" he said. "It seems kind of disrespectful."

Mr. Havens found himself a double outsider of sorts. In addition to being devoted to his faith, he was a scholarship student at a university where half the students can afford $45,000 in tuition and fees without recourse to financial aid and where, he said, many tend to "spend money like water."

But his modest means did not stand out as much as his efforts to guard his morals. He did not drink, and he almost never cursed. And he was determined to stay "pure" until marriage, though he did not lack for attention from female students. Just as his mother feared, Mr. Havens, a broad-shouldered former wrestler with tousled brown hair and a guileless smile, wavered some his freshman year and dated several classmates.

"I was just like, 'Oh, I can get this girl to like me,' " he recalled. " 'Oh, she likes me; she's cute.' And so it was a lot of fairly short and meaningless relationships. It was pretty destructive."

In his sophomore year, though, his evangelical a cappella singing group, a Christian twist on an old Ivy League tradition, interceded. With its support, he rededicated himself to serving God, and by his senior year he was running his own Bible-study group, hoping to inoculate first-year students against the temptations he had faced. They challenged one another, Mr. Havens said, "committing to remain sexually pure, both in a physical sense and in avoiding pornography and ogling women and like that."

Mr. Havens is now living in a house owned and supported by the Christian Union and is trying to reach not just other evangelicals but nonbelievers as well.

Prayers in the Boardrooms

The Christian Union is the brainchild of Matt Bennett, 40, who earned bachelor's and master's degrees at Cornell and later directed the Campus Crusade for Christ at Princeton. Mr. Bennett, tall and soft-spoken, with a Texas drawl that waxes and wanes depending on the company he is in, said he got the idea during a 40-day water-and-juice fast, when he heard God speaking to him one night in a dream.

"He was speaking to me very strongly that he wanted to see an increasing and dramatic spiritual revival in a place like Princeton," Mr. Bennett said.

While working for Campus Crusade, Mr. Bennett had discovered that it was hard to recruit evangelicals to minister to the elite colleges of the Northeast because the environment was alien to them and the campuses often far from their homes. He also found that the evangelical ministries were hobbled without adequate salaries to attract professional staff members and without centers of their own where students could gather, socialize and study the Bible. Jews had Hillel Houses, and Roman Catholics had Newman Centers.

He thought evangelicals should have their own houses, too, and began a furious round of fund-raising to buy or build some. An early benefactor was his twin brother, Monty, who had taken over the Dallas hotel empire their father built from a single Holiday Inn and who had donated a three-story Victorian in a neighborhood near Brown.

To raise more money, Matt Bennett has followed a grapevine of affluent evangelicals around the country, winding up even in places where evangelicals would have been a rarity just a few decades ago. In Manhattan, for example, he visited Wall Street boardrooms and met with the founder of Socrates in the City, a roundtable for religious intellectuals that gathers monthly at places like the Algonquin Hotel and the Metropolitan Club.

Those meetings introduced him to an even more promising pool of like-minded Christians, the New Canaan Group, a Friday morning prayer breakfast typically attended by more than a hundred investment bankers and other professionals. The breakfasts started in the Connecticut home of a partner in Goldman, Sachs but grew so large that they had to move to a local church. Like many other evangelicals, some members attend churches that adhere to evangelical doctrine but that remain affiliated with mainline denominations.

Other donors to the Christian Union are members of local elites across the Bible Belt. Not long ago, for example, Mr. Bennett paid a visit to Montgomery, Ala., for lunch with Julian L. McPhillips Jr., a wealthy Princeton alumnus and the managing partner of a local law firm. Mr. Bennett, wearing an orange Princeton tie, said he wanted to raise enough money for the Christian Union to hire someone to run a "healing ministry" for students with depression, eating disorders or drug or alcohol addiction.

Mr. McPhillips, who shares Mr. Bennett's belief in the potential of faith healing, remarked that he had once cured an employee's migraine headaches just by praying for him. "We joke in my office that we don't need health insurance," he told Mr. Bennett before writing a check for $1,000.

Mr. Bennett's database has so far grown to about 5,000 names gathered by word of mouth alone. They are mostly Ivy League graduates whose regular alumni contributions he hopes to channel into the Christian Union. And these Ivy League evangelicals, in turn, are just a small fraction of the large number of their affluent fellow believers.

Gaining on the Mainline

Their commitment to their faith is confounding a long-held assumption that, like earlier generations of Baptists or Pentecostals, prosperous evangelicals would abandon their religious ties or trade them for membership in establishment churches. Instead, they have kept their traditionalist beliefs, and their churches have even attracted new members from among the well-off.

Meanwhile, evangelical Protestants are pulling closer to their mainline counterparts in class and education. As late as 1965, for example, a white mainline Protestant was two and a half times as likely to have a college degree as a white evangelical, according to an analysis by Prof. Corwin E. Smidt, a political scientist at Calvin College, an evangelical institution in Grand Rapids, Mich. But by 2000, a mainline Protestant was only 65 percent more likely to have the same degree. And since 1985, the percentage of incoming freshmen at highly selective private universities who said they were born-again also rose by half, to 11 or 12 percent each year from 7.3 percent, according to the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles.

To many evangelical Christians, the reason for their increasing worldly success and cultural influence is obvious: God's will at work. Some also credit leaders like the midcentury intellectual Carl F. H. Henry, who helped to found a large and influential seminary, a glossy evangelical Christian magazine and the National Association of Evangelicals, a powerful umbrella group that now includes 51 denominations. Dr. Henry and his followers implored believers to look beyond their churches and fight for a place in the American mainstream.

There were also demographic forces at work, beginning with the G.I. Bill, which sent a pioneering generation of evangelicals to college. Probably the greatest boost to the prosperity of evangelicals as a group came with the Sun Belt expansion of the 1970's and the Texas oil boom, which brought new wealth and businesses to the regions where evangelical churches had been most heavily concentrated.

The most striking example of change in how evangelicals see themselves and their place in the world may be the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal denomination. It was founded in Hot Springs, Ark., in 1914 by rural and working-class Christians who believed that the Holy Spirit had moved them to speak in tongues. Shunned by established churches, they became a sect of outsiders, and their preachers condemned worldly temptations like dancing, movies, jewelry and swimming in public pools. But like the Southern Baptists and other conservative denominations, the Assemblies gradually dropped their separatist strictures as their membership prospered and spread.

As the denomination grew, Assemblies preachers began speaking not only of heavenly rewards but also of the material blessings God might provide in this world. The notion was controversial in some evangelical circles but became widespread nonetheless, and it made the Assemblies' faith more compatible with an upwardly mobile middle class.

By the 1970's, Assemblies churches were sprouting up in affluent suburbs across the country. Recent surveys by Margaret Poloma, a historian at the University of Akron in Ohio, found Assemblies members more educated and better off than the general public.

As they flourished, evangelical entrepreneurs and strivers built a distinctly evangelical business culture of prayer meetings, self-help books and business associations. In some cities outside the Northeast, evangelical business owners list their names in Christian yellow pages.

The rise of evangelicals has also coincided with the gradual shift of most of them from the Democratic Party to the Republican and their growing political activism. The conservative Christian political movement seldom developed in poor, rural Bible Belt towns. Instead, its wellsprings were places like the Rev. Ed Young's booming mega-church in suburban Houston or the Rev. Timothy LaHaye's in Orange County, Calif., where evangelical professionals and businessmen had the wherewithal to push back against the secular culture by organizing boycotts, electing school board members and lobbying for conservative judicial appointments.

'A Bunch of Heathens'

Mr. Havens, the Brown missionary, is part of the upsurge of well-educated born-again Christians. He grew up in one of the few white households in a poor black neighborhood of St. Louis, where his parents had moved to start a church, which failed to take off. Mr. Havens's father never graduated from college. After being laid off from his job at a marketing company two years ago, he now works in an insurance company's software and systems department. Tim Havens's mother home-schooled the family's six children for at least a few years each.

Mr. Havens got through Brown on scholarships and loans, and at graduation was $25,000 in debt. To return to campus for his missionary year and pay his expenses, he needed to raise an additional $36,000, and on the advice of Geoff Freeman, the head of the Brown branch of Campus Crusade, he did his fund-raising in St. Louis.

"It is easy to sell New England in the Midwest," as Mr. Freeman put it later. Midwesterners, he said, see New Englanders as "a bunch of heathens."

So Mr. Havens drove home each day from a summer job at a stone supply warehouse to work the phone from his cluttered childhood bedroom. He told potential donors that many of the American-born students at Brown had never even been to church, to say nothing of the students from Asia or the Middle East. "In a sense, it is pre-Christian," he explained.

Among his family's friends, however, encouragement was easier to come by than cash. As the summer came to a close, Mr. Havens was still $6,000 short. He decided to give himself a pay cut and go back to Brown with what he had raised, trusting God to take care of his needs just as he always had when money seemed scarce during college.

"God owns the cattle on a thousand hills," he often told himself. "God has plenty of money."

Thanks to the Christian Union, Mr. Haven's present quarters as a ministry intern at Brown are actually more upscale than his home in St. Louis. On Friday nights, he is a host for a Bible-study and dinner party for 70 or 80 Christian students, who serve themselves heaping plates of pasta before breaking into study groups. Afterward, they regroup in the living room for board games and goofy improvisation contests, all free of profanity and even double entendre.

Lately, though, Mr. Havens has been contemplating steps that would take him away from Brown and campus ministry. After a chaste romance - "I didn't kiss her until I asked her to marry me," he said - he recently became engaged to a missionary colleague, Liz Chalmers. He has been thinking about how to support the children they hope to have.

And he has been considering the example of his future father-in-law, Daniel Chalmers, a Baptist missionary to the Philippines who ended up building power plants there and making a small fortune. Mr. Chalmers has been a steady donor to Christian causes, and he bought a plot of land in Oregon, where he plans to build a retreat center.

"God has always used wealthy people to help the church," Mr. Havens said. He pointed out that in the Bible, rich believers helped support the apostles, just as donors to the Christian Union are investing strategically in the Ivy League today.

With those examples and his own father in mind, Mr. Havens chose medicine over campus ministry. He scored well on his medical school entrance exams and, after another year at Brown, he will head to St. Louis University School of Medicine. At the Christian Union conference in April, he was pleased to hear doctors talk about praying with their patients and traveling as medical missionaries.

He is looking forward to having the money a medical degree can bring, and especially to putting his children through college without the scholarships and part-time jobs he needed. But whether he becomes rich, he said, "will depend on how much I keep."

Like other evangelicals of his generation, he means to take his faith with him as he makes his way in the world. He said his roommates at Brown had always predicted that he would "sell out"- loosen up about his faith and adopt their taste for new cars, new clothes and the other trappings of the upper class.

He didn't at Brown and he thinks he never will.

"So far so good," he said. But he admitted, "I don't have any money yet."

On a humid November evening in Gulfport, Miss., National Guard members from Tennessee waited to board jumbo jets that would start their journey to Iraq. The line of soldiers was so long, it edged along the runway for hundreds of yards.

Given the deteriorating security in Iraq, it had been obvious for months that the Guard unit - E Troop, Second Squadron, 278th Armored Cavalry Regiment - would be called up. Still, the deployment was tough on the soldiers and their families.

The National Guard, as many have noted, is not a cross-section of America. Since the draft was abandoned in 1973, the Guard has drawn overwhelmingly from the working class, like the Army itself. The incomes of members of E Troop cluster around the Tennessee median income, about $38,000. Few are well-to-do, the kinds of people who often joined the Guard to avoid going to Vietnam. Few are among the very poor, who often manned the front lines in that war.

Most of the Guard members have roots deep in their communities in and around Newport, Tenn. Many of their fathers and grandfathers served in the military. Older than most active Army recruits, many have wives and children, which deepens the emotional wrench and practical dislocations.

To sample their views, a reporter and a photographer spent time with the soldiers during five months of training. For the most part, they did not view their role as soldiers in class terms. Many seemed to support the war in Iraq, however much they may have hated the prospect of being away from home and serving in a hostile country. Go to Slide Show

                                Family Fortunes 
 
  Where men fall on the pay scale as adults when their fathers were in the 
 
               . . . bottom 25%       . . . top 25% 
                  of earners            of earners 
 
Top half              32%                   65% 
 
Bottom half           68%                   34% 
 
  Note: 1995-98 wages for sons born between 1963-68. Figures don't add up to 
100% due to rounding. 
 
  Source: Bhashkar Mazumder, Chicago Federal Reserve Bank 

[Graph]
The Haves: American households with net worth of more than $10 million

1983 ~120,000
1989 ~200,000
1998 ~225,000
2001 ~430,000

Sources: Edward N. Wolff, New York University; Surveys of Consumer Finances