Seed on the Wind

XII

“Come on,” said Pete, “immerse yourself, for god’s sake give these miserable plebeian waters a treat; let them taste divinity.”

“I can’t, really I can’t,” Lora protested.

“What do you mean you can’t?”

“Well then — I don’t want to.”

“I know what it is,” he declared, “but it’s superstition. Its birth was doubtless similar to that of a million other fond lunatic beliefs of old homo. This one is older than most — a billion years probably. When some strange four- or six-legged creature first discovered it could live out of water it began to think up excuses for not going back in. It’s bad for the fur, it takes the gloss off, was probably one of the first. We never shake off a habit; we haven’t got rid of that one yet, though its utility vanished before homo began. Look at you, convinced that the internal flow prescribes a dry exterior, afraid I’ll bet even to take a sponge bath until nature’s dam has closed the gates again...”

“It’s not that,” Lora smiled. “I just don’t want to.”

“But you love it. I like to see you too, you swim like a dolphin — though I’ve never seen one.”

“Not today.”

She was minded to tell him. Already it was obvious that it could not have been kept forever a secret — this incident alone proved it. For that matter why had she not done so at once? She would be proud to tell him! But she had been silent. She sat now laughing at him as he plunged again into the water of the lake, staying under for thirty feet or more, then coming to the surface and lying flat on his back, wiggling his toes at her. And the next day but one he would be gone. As he turned over on his belly and with slow steady strokes headed for the center of the lake she lay back on the pebbly sand, drowsy in the hot July sunshine, drowsy too with sadness.

The middle of July. June, May, April, March — she had known him only four months, then. Just think of that — over nineteen years up to the day she met Pete Halliday, and only four months since! That was nonsense, no matter how many calendars verified it.

Even the very first meeting had been memorable. She and Cecelia had gone to an evening party at the home of Mrs. Ranley, the old friend of Cecelia’s mother who had helped them get settled in Chicago, and as usual had been somewhat bored. There was no dancing at Mrs. Ranley’s gatherings — the nearest thing to it was when someone played Tales of the Vienna Woods or the Hungarian Rhapsody on the victrola, and even this was frowned upon in the next room where the bridge tables were. There had been the usual crowd, mostly middle-aged business and professional men and their wives, a daughter or son here and there, a few friends, both sexes, of Grace Ranley, whose mother believed in a pleasant mingling of the generations — because, Cece Harper declared pointedly, she herself, a widow, liked to have young men about. At any rate, there they all were, as usual, and as usual Lora had begun to look for Cece at an early hour to persuade her to go home, when she found herself suddenly confronted, and her progress blocked, by a tall white-faced bony young man whom she had never seen before. Looking up, for he was a good nine inches above her level, she found his deep-set restless brown eyes regarding her approvingly. As she looked the eyes smiled.

“It must be that this is what I was dragged here for,” he said.

“Oh,” said Lora.

“I have always had a theory,” he continued — the “always” somewhat rhetorical, since he could not have been more than twenty-one or two at the most — “that dark hair renders grey eyes insipid. Here in the midst of this den of pseudogentility—”

“Mine are yellow.”

“They might be in a different light. I speak subjectively. Come.” He put his hand on her arm, gently but not at all timidly, and started to turn, turning her with him, toward the large inner room she thought.

She stood fast. “I don’t play bridge. I’m going home.”

“Bridge, my god!” He threw up his hands, releasing her arm to do so. “We’re going somewhere to talk about eyes. I’ll go home with you if that’s feasible. Better yet, I know a place down in the Loop—”

“I don’t know you.”

“Easy. Pete Halliday. You’re Lora Winter.”

“How did you know that?”

“Easy again. It was Stubby Mallinson that dragged me here. Directly I saw you I demanded details. Come, let’s get out of this.”

She shook her head. “I’m here with a friend — I was just looking for her to get her to go home — really I must go — I’m awfully tired and I have to get up in the morning — I’m a working girl.”

“What do you work at?”

“I run the telephone switchboard in a candy factory.”

“Preposterous! You shouldn’t submit to it!”

“No, it’s fun,” Lora declared. “I don’t mind it, except that I have to get up at seven o’clock. That’s pretty bad. But if I didn’t do that I’d stay in bed till noon, and that’s worse. I’m lazy.”

“I’ll take you home.”

“It isn’t necessary. Cece — my friend — will come. You can help me find her.”

He went with her through the various rooms, but Cecelia was not to be found. At length, about ready to give it up and trying the porch as a last resort, they discovered her there on a rug in a corner with six or eight others, laughing and giggling, huddled together to keep warm in the cold and darkness. Cecelia didn’t want to go home, she said, she was having a good time, she was going to stay.

“All right, I’ll go along,” said Lora.

“Alone?”

“Mr. Halliday will take me.”

She hadn’t intended to say that; she wasn’t at all sure she liked Mr. Halliday; but it was out before she knew it. They went back in to get their wraps.

As they reached the sidewalk and turned north toward the nearest traffic street, Pete Halliday suddenly asked, “Have you got money for a taxi? If not we’ll take a car.”

“Yes. I’ve plenty. But I’d just as soon take a car—”

“By no means.” He drew her hand through his arm. “I hate the damn cars.” After a moment he went on, “To avoid confusion you should know at once that the one thing I never have is money. It is simply astonishing how little money I have.”

“You live, apparently.”

“I doubt it. I must owe enormous sums, and yet that doesn’t seem plausible, for no living soul would lend me a cent. It’s a mystery.”

At the corner, after waiting a little, they hailed a taxi. It’s nice, Lora thought as he helped her in, that I can do this, since he hates cars so.

He sprawled in a corner as they rattled along, with his legs extended and his feet up on the little folding seat in front.

“This is the way to travel,” he declared. “This or walk. Communal vehicles are abominable. Here’s an experiment: look at the faces you see on the street, preferably a street not too crowded, so that there’s no bumping at least. Examine them and note them; they’re not beautiful, god knows, but in many there is still a gleam of spirit, you suspect the presence of life. Then look at them on a street-car or elevated train; even that tiny gleam is gone, they’re beyond hope, you imagine you’re in a catacombs where they bury them sitting or standing to save space. Why? They’ve lost the last vestige of their freedom of movement. Walking, even on a crowded street, you’re more or less your own man, you can stop and turn as you please and the worst that can happen is that you knock somebody down, not of necessity a calamity. This taxicab will go wherever we tell it to, we can change our minds at any instant; it would even turn directly around if we said so and dash off in the opposite direction. Whereas a street-car is an inhuman and uncontrollable juggernaut, a blind senseless force of nature, yes nature, created originally by man and now in obscene disdain thumbing its nose at him. There goes a car bound for the Stanton Avenue terminal; it is beyond any human power to turn it from its course or halt it in its obstinate career; it’s as inevitable as an avalanche.”

“The motorman—”

“Bah, I was speaking of passengers, but let even the motor-man try it. Jail or the insane asylum; the mere fact that he thought of such a thing would prove that he was crazy. The division superintendent? They’d fire him. The general manager? The same; there’d be a meeting of outraged and horrified directors at midnight. Even the owner himself couldn’t do it; they’d take his franchise away from him. No, by god, in spite of anything living man can do that street-car is going to the Stanton Avenue terminal. That’s why it makes me ill to ride on them; I get a headache, I grow dizzy, and I can’t breathe.”

“Not really?”

“No. Of course not. As a matter of fact I’ve never been on one; but I’ve reached my conclusions. You will pay for this taxi, but I couldn’t very well expect you to pay for one to take me home, so I shall walk. It’s no hardship, I’ve nothing else to do.”

So there was no talk of eyes after all; apparently he had forgotten all about it. He rambled on about communal vehicles and their share in the destruction of the human spirit — airplanes and airships would, he thought, in time prove to be the most loathsome of all — until the taxi pulled up at the curb in front of her address. He got out and helped her out, and Lora paid the driver. She was a little embarrassed, which was most unusual, indeed unprecedented, for her. She wasn’t accustomed to paying for a man. Should she invite him up? Should she offer him money to ride home? How far had he to go? Without a hat, he stood there with the March wind blowing long strands of his hair across his forehead and over his eyes, stooped a little, peering at her in the dim light.

“I can walk six miles an hour,” he announced. “That is prodigious, but it’s true. I’m going to come and see you some time and make sure about the eyes.”

“Yes. Do. I’d be glad.”

“Fine! Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

He turned and was gone, in great strides, but before she had had time to enter the vestibule he stopped abruptly, ten paces off, and called to her:

“I shall be damned uncomfortable the next day or two, thinking of you at the telephone switchboard of a candy factory! Preposterous!”

He turned again and was off for good.

A strange roaring sort of young man, Lora thought, as she got ready for bed. Overpowering and confusing, like a waterfall when you stand too close to it. If she had invited him up and he had come what would have happened? Would he have been like Stubby Mallinson, trying to paw you like a bear before you had time to get your hat off, or like Mr. Graham — who owned the candy factory — sitting up straight with his hands folded in his lap, constantly wetting his lips under his little grey moustache so that the bright red tip of his tongue went in and out until, fascinated, you dragged your eyes away? Neither one; none of them. He would have been different. What made his face so white? She decided to stay awake until Cece came and ask her if she knew anything about him, but when the door softly opened an hour later she was sound asleep.

She thought of him through the next day as she sat at the switchboard, yawning and wishing the buzzers would sound often enough to keep her awake. She had decided the first week that this job was far too monotonous, but there seemed to be no alternative. At least it was better than the piano lessons, which she had given up after a brief month’s trial. That had been late in November, and for a few weeks thereafter, until the time came for her and Cecelia to go home for Christmas, she had done nothing but loaf. At home she had not mentioned the abandonment of the lessons, and Cecelia had been sworn to secrecy. Returning to Chicago the third day of the new year, and letting it be known through Cecelia and Mrs. Ranley that she was seeking an occupation, she had been invited by Mr. Graham — timidly, by way of Mrs. Ranley again — to join the staff of the most sanitary candy factory east of the Mississippi. When she found that joining the staff, translated into concrete and specific terms, meant sitting on a stool nine hours a day connecting Mr. Warton with Miss Goff, or getting Michigan 3208 extension 41 for Mr. Graham, she felt mildly that she had been cheated; but after all she was only nineteen, totally without training or experience, and it was a clean agreeable quiet place to work, if only Miss Goff would quit sneezing her glasses off her thin sharp nose.

Each week, promptly on Tuesday morning, she received a check from her father, and each time she removed it from the envelope she felt guilty and uneasy; this was her first major deception. But she could not bring herself to tell him that the piano lessons were no more — not that she was afraid of him exactly, she had pretty well shown that she had a mind of her own — it was merely that she felt it undesirable and impolitic to reopen a painful question. Thus it was impossible to inform him that the remittance need no longer include the sum required for Mr. Burchellini’s fee; so each week after the check was cashed she carefully put away a twenty-dollar bill at the bottom of the drawer where she kept her handkerchiefs and stockings. Some day she could return it to him; that would be a pleasant surprise, she thought, and nothing to turn up his nose at, either; it was amazing how fast it piled up.

Joining the staff at the candy factory had somewhat disarranged the domestic scene. Whereas Lora now had to arise at seven and therefore needed to be in bed by ten-thirty or eleven, Cecelia did not have to appear at the School of Design before noon and could stay in bed till eleven if she wanted to. This had its drawbacks; they could no longer have pleasant leisurely breakfasts together by the sunny south window, talking over new acquaintances, mimicking Mrs. Ranley, recalling personalities and episodes and scandals from home, laughing at nothing and at each other. Lora missed this; so did Cecelia, who declared it was idiotic for Lora to waste her time sitting at a silly switchboard, actually getting up at seven o’clock six days a week for that; if she was really convinced she couldn’t do the piano — though for her part Cecelia thought she played very well indeed, take the Melody in F, for instance — she should try design, or modelling perhaps, if not sculpture then at least pottery — something worthwhile and creative. Unquestionably Lora had talent, she said — look at the decorations she had made for the high school pageant — everyone had been charmed by them. Which reminded her, why not try the stage? That was interesting and exciting and offered splendid opportunities for self-expression; she would like to take a go at it herself if she weren’t so buried in her career as an artist. Not that actresses weren’t artists too in a way...

Lora smiled and said nothing; her disagreement with this analysis was expressed only tacitly, in action. There were other disagreements — as to whether both windows should be left open on winter nights, for example — in which she was more vocal; but that and all others were friendly and without acrimony. The first that really produced heat was started by Cecelia’s objections to Pete Halliday.

She was as tolerant as the next one, she asserted, but Pete Halliday was a little too much. She didn’t know what Stubby Mallinson could have been thinking of to take him to the Ranleys’. All the boys agreed, even Stubby, that he was the most notorious character at the university; the only reason he hadn’t been kicked out was that he was so clever they couldn’t prove anything on him. It appeared that he would now be permitted to remain until June and get his diploma, that was true; it was also true that in the classes he condescended to attend he was insufferably brilliant; but he was a liar and a thief and a sneak. He was suspected on good grounds of things like stealing overcoats and selling them, things too petty and disgusting to talk about. When some of the boys made certain arrangements regarding examination questions he squealed on them. He exhibited a compromising letter which he had received from the wife of one of the professors, and then left it where the professor was sure to find it. Proof? No, he always arranged it so there should be no proof. He stole an automobile which belonged to one of the students and ran it off a pier into Lake Michigan...

“I know,” said Lora, “he told me about it. He said the student said all poetry should have a moral purpose. Anyway he said it didn’t do any good because he found out later that the insurance company paid for it.”

“Why shouldn’t poetry have a moral purpose?”

“I don’t know, I never read poetry. Neither do you.”

“I might. That doesn’t help matters anyhow. You know very well he’s not a decent person. You’re just being contrary; you’re just doing this out of spite.”

“I don’t see that it spites anyone.”

“All right; you’ll be sorry.”

It was around midnight, and they were getting ready for bed. Pete Halliday had left only ten minutes before; it had been his third or fourth visit; Cecelia had returned from the theatre just before his departure. She sat now on the edge of the bed massaging her scalp with her fingers, with her blond bobbed hair flying first this way then that; all of her fair white body was exposed save where the flimsy silk underwear, the straps slipped from the shoulders, had fallen about her middle; one stocking was off and the other was in loose folds about the knee. Lora, in a long yellow nightgown, to her ankles, her feet bare, with a toothbrush in her hand headed for the bathroom, stopped to fasten her regard on her friend with her eyebrows down.

“Look here, Cece,” she said, “you can be nasty about Pete if you want to. Your dumb friends, too. You might as well shut up.”

“If it’s a question of being dumb—” the other began; but Lora had gone into the bathroom, so she raised her voice: “What do you mean my dumb friends? They’re yours as much as mine.”

There was no answer save the sound of the running faucet and the swish of the toothbrush. Cecelia hauled off the other stocking with a tug and threw it at a chair.

That was the beginning of April, and Lora had entered upon a new experience. She had sat at a restaurant table and seen Pete Halliday’s hand resting on the cloth before her, within reach; and later, alone in her room, had shivered with pleasure at the thought of that hand touching her. She did not like the feeling and assuredly did not invite it, but try as she might to replace it with more comfortable reflections, such as the birthday present soon to be sent to her mother or Grace Ranley’s recipe for fudge, there the hand was back again, on her shoulder or arm — even, if not caught in time, on her leg or her breast — the skin shrinking and tingling with horrified delight, her throat obstructed so that she had to gulp two or three times to get her breath normal again. It created in her a curious sort of panic, more confused than frightened; she simply didn’t understand it. Its threat was much more profound than anything she had guessed the existence of. Factually she was anything but ignorant; two of her school friends had already become mothers before she left home; another had been disgraced and the details were known to her; while she had never actually seen a man naked she knew the geography of the male form as well as she did that of Illinois, her native state; and she knew that girls trembled and lost their heads — lucky if that was all — under certain trying conditions. She herself had momentarily trembled now and then, having indeed on one occasion been sufficiently aroused so that by way of reaction she almost cracked the young man’s head in two. But this was so different that it was not the same thing at all. Pete Halliday had not once offered to touch her; she had no reason to suppose that the idea had ever occurred to him; and yet she would sit at night on the little chair at the dressing-table she shared with Cecelia, her hair down over her shoulders like a rich dark shawl, the brush forgotten and idle in her hand, lost in a vague but overwhelming expectancy that seemed to begin in her stomach and spread irresistibly — destroying even the wish to resist — throughout every drop of her blood and every ounce of her flesh. It came with greatest force just then and there, with the hairbrush in her hand, for he had used that brush himself one evening on his own tangled hair, having walked four miles in Chicago’s March wind with no hat.

“It won’t help any,” he had declared, jabbing the bristles violently into the disorderly mass. “Anyway it’s better not; when it once gets good and matted it can’t blow around so much.”

“Let me do it,” Lora offered. He grinned and sat down.

With the aid of a comb she finally got the tangles out and achieved a semblance of order. She detected a salty odor, she thought, and wondered if the ocean smelled like that. She kept her hands indifferent and perfectly steady; it was an effort, but a choking feeling in her throat made her aware how perilously near she was to betraying herself. Until that moment, indeed, until she felt herself almost overpowered by the salty odor from his hair, there had been no real alarm. She had to be careful about her face too, for he could see her in the mirror.

“It’s too dry, may I wet it?” she said.

“And me with no hat, and going out into that wind? Delilah with her scissors wanted only castration, you would take life itself. I prefer tonsorial chaos to pneumonia.”

“Does castration mean cutting off hair?”

“Symbolically, yes.” He grinned at her reflection in the mirror. “It makes the hair fall out, they say.”

“I don’t know much about words. I wish I did.”

“You don’t need to. You know something much more important than words. Words are no good.”

She wanted to ask what it was that she knew more important than words, but was afraid further to trust her voice. As she placed the comb and brush on the dressing-table she saw some of his hairs, lighter in color than her own, clinging to the bristles. Cecelia will notice that, she thought, and picked the comb and brush up again and put them away in a drawer.

It was somewhat later, early in April, a week or so after Cecelia’s final valiant effort to rescue her friend from the clutches of a blackguard, that Lora for the first time extracted a crisp twenty from the hoard in the handkerchief drawer. The occasion was this: Cecelia had departed on Saturday morning for a weekend visit to friends in Eastview, and Pete and Lora had arranged to dine downtown and afterwards go to the theatre. She had already given him money to get the tickets, but was doubtful whether she had enough left for the dinner. The event proved that the precaution was well taken, for what with an elaborate meal at Dillon’s, a taxi to the theatre, a rarebit with beer afterwards, and a taxi out to the apartment, the remains of the twenty were hardly more than chicken feed. That was how Pete phrased it, as he searched his pockets for bits of change to hand to her — for it had become the custom for him to assume the functions of chancellor of the exchequer and return the residue at the end of the evening. Sometimes this was done on the sidewalk, when it was late and Lora had to work the next day; on other occasions, as the present one, the transfer was made after they had mounted to the apartment and Pete had got comfortably into his favorite chair.

“We ought to figure it up,” he declared. “How do we know but that I’ve a five — a ten even, though that transcends all like-lihood — stuck away in my vest or in this little trick pocket in my pants that I pretend I can’t get my fingers into? It would be just like me. I seem to have a faint memory of folding up a five separately and tucking it away somewhere, while we were in the restaurant I think. You didn’t happen to see me?”

Lora was seated cross-legged on a cushion on the floor, in front of him, not far away, watching the smoke curl upward from the tip of her cigarette.

“Yes,” she said, without looking at him, “it’s in that little pocket in your trousers.”

He threw back his head and burst into a roar of laughter.

“You’re not so smart,” she went on, “I knew you knew I saw you. You were trying to see if I’d lie about it.”

“How much have you got there?” he demanded.

She fingered over the little pile beside her on the carpet — three silver dollars and several smaller pieces.

“Four dollars and forty cents.”

“A goodly sum.” He made his voice deep, down in his throat. “Almost precisely a day of your wages. I shudder — absolutely and visibly shudder — to reflect that that miserable little heap of metal represents nine hours, nine glorious miraculous hours, of the coursing of your sweet young juices and the disintegration of your lovely flesh. There it lies, look at it, four dollars and forty cents.”

“My flesh isn’t disintegrating.”

“Oho, it isn’t, eh? Immortal? You’ve learned the secret...”

“No, I’m too young. I won’t begin to disintegrate for ten years at least.”

“You began the day you were born. However, let that pass. The point is, you’re a slave. Not to the switchboard or the little worm that owns it, but to yourself. For illustration, that five dollars I may have thoughtlessly tucked away; why do you let me keep it?”

“I don’t.”

“Demand it then.”

Lora stretched out her hand and said commandingly:

“Give it to me.”

He grinned at her, not mockingly or in refusal, not with any content whatever; he simply grinned. She got onto her knees so as to reach further; her hand was nearly touching him.

“Give it to me,” she repeated.

Still grinning, and leaning back so as to release the pressure of his belt, he got his fingers into the little waistline pocket of his trousers and pulled out a small folded wad, no bigger than a postage stamp. He unfolded it and smoothed it out.

“Good guess, it’s a five all right. Do you mean it?”

“Yes.”

He placed it, flat, on her outstretched palm. Her fingers closed around it and she dropped back from her knees onto the cushion. Then her fingers opened again, letting the crumpled bill flutter to the carpet, and her head bent suddenly forward, lower and lower, and her hands came up to cover her face, spreading themselves protectingly over her face that did not want him to see.

“I warn you, it mustn’t be left there,” she heard his voice. “Either you take it or you don’t. Slave or master, either will work; in between those two honesties are all the lies and pretenses in the world. You take it, that’s fine, your pretty little ankles are still free to dance and kick all they want to — or give it back to me, frankly I prefer that, I happen to need it, and then we’ll know where we stand. But for god’s sake don’t leave it between us on the floor, that’s humanism, the cooperative society, the triumph of liberal progress, the only real hell, the Great Universal Smirk. What if I grab it and run? It’s quite possible, for I shall want to eat tomorrow. Then you are in a mess, the painful position, not at all uncommon, of wanting what you didn’t take and taking what you didn’t want, and after all left with nothing...”

Lora’s hands suddenly came down and her face shot up; it was flushed and marks showed where her fingers had pressed, but there was no trace of tears.

“Oh, shut up!” she flung at him.

She reached out with her foot, got the toe of her slipper behind the folds of the five-dollar bill and shoved it across the carpet towards him until it touched his shoe.

“I don’t want it, it isn’t worth the fuss,” she said. “It’s all right as far as I’m concerned if you take money from me, I don’t mind, but you might have the decency not to talk about it.”

He reached down for the bill, smoothed and folded it as before, and returned it to his pocket. Lora watched him.

“I wonder,” he remarked, “whether you have any idea what you mean when you say decency.”

“Maybe I mean decency. It’s a plain word.”

“Not at all plain. Did you ever hear of sex? If I take money from a man without intending to repay it, it may not even be dishonest; many men have done it whose statues are in our public parks and buildings. But if I take it from a woman we don’t stop at dishonest; it becomes, as we say, positively indecent. Now why? Obviously because man wants a woman’s body, particularly that portion of it which he customarily uses, constantly available at a minimum cost of time and effort; the simplest way out of that is to own a woman. But if he owns her he must feed her; more, he can’t expect to be permitted to own and feed one unless other men will do the same. In defense of this manufactured right — masquerading as a duty — he is led inevitably to the corollary: any man who instead of owning and feeding a woman permits himself to be fed by one is unmanly. Indecent. See how smoothly it works? Imagine the system functioning on an isolated island where there are only ten men and ten women and you’ll see how dangerous the exception would be to the institution. But here’s where the real joke comes in: women, completely bamboozled by man’s superior capacity to twist words, have become more ardent supporters of his system than man himself. It was you, a woman, and by no means an inferior specimen, quite the contrary, who just now spoke of decency. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

“It’s very complicated,” said Lora. She was thinking: anyway I’m not an inferior specimen, that’s something, that’s exciting, that is.

“So if I take money from you, and even go to the unheard of extreme of talking about it,” he went on, “it’s really a compliment. At least it’s a compliment to your sex, for to be perfectly honest about it I was never able to comprehend how it was possible for a man to want to own and feed a woman till I met you.”

“Oh,” said Lora.

“I don’t mean the underlying economic and biological motives, I understand them of course; I mean the individual man and the individual woman. It has always seemed to me that a man who willingly — nay, eagerly — jumped into that pot was an emotional lunatic. I see now that it’s possible. Not that I’d do it, but it’s conceivable. I can easily believe that a man might regard you as something much more serious than a brief and pleasant episode. The first evening I saw you, out at that bridge den, I thought to myself, ha, here’s a nice little posy for the buttonhole, and then after I got you into a taxi all I did was give you a sermon on street-cars.”

He stopped to light a cigarette. Lora was silent, and when he offered one to her she shook her head. Now, she supposed, thus interrupted, he would jump back to economic and biological motives. But after he had taken a puff or two, inhaled, and expelled the grey smoke through his mouth and nose simultaneously, what he said was:

“You know, I’ve got a confession to make that I’m ashamed of. I’d like to give you something.

“It’s the first time I’ve ever felt that way,” he went on, as she said nothing. “I’ve given people things, but only as a gesture of contempt or indifference. This is different, and I don’t like it. Just last evening I caught myself looking in the window of a confectioner’s shop thinking it would be nice to take you a box of candy. Then I remembered you work in a candy factory, so flowers or a book would be better.”

“I would have loved flowers.”

“Sure you would. Why not? Anybody would. You notice I didn’t get them, but even that doesn’t make me entirely easy, for I was influenced by the consideration that the money in my pocket had come from you and that it would be idiotic to present you with flowers bought with your own money. That is, not your own, but it had been. By god, if I catch myself going around like a brainless ass giving flowers to girls—”

“I’m not girls.”

“Aha!” She was startled, he leaped to his feet so suddenly and unexpectedly. “That’s what I’ve been looking for! That’s the signal, is it? No, you don’t, it won’t work! I’ve still got my head on my shoulders, thank god! What signal? The signal for going home — you ought to see it. The signal for walking the sight of you out of my eyes! The wind will blow it out!”

Lora sat on her cushion, not moving. But he was going, no doubt about it; already he was halfway across the room; in another instant his hand would be on the doorknob.

“Pete!” she cried, scrambling to her feet.

He glared at her with his deep-set eyes.

“Look here,” he said, “you’d better let me go. I’m no good for you. You’re no maid of pleasure, nor wife on half rations either. That shouldn’t make any difference, not to me, but it does. What you want is a husband and a little house at Oak Park with a garage and peony bushes. I have other plans. Good night.”

Lora felt that she would never swallow again. Could she speak?

“Don’t go,” she said.

“Good night, I tell you.”

“No. Don’t go.”

He took his hand from the doorknob and turned towards her, his broad shoulders and his head bent a little forward as he peered at her across the room.

“If I stay, I stay.” He laughed, a short roar of a laugh. “I’ll bet you have no idea what that means.”

This to Lora, who that very afternoon, after Cecelia’s departure for her weekend at Eastview, had made the bed up with smooth clean sheets, though they were ordinarily changed on Monday! As she did that there had been nothing definite in her head, there had been no room for anything definite, it had been so filled with a wild and sweet bewilderment. Her hands, smoothing out the sheets, had not needed to know where their orders came from; nor did her tongue now, as she gave Pete look for look and said quietly:

“Come and sit down again.”