Seed on the Wind

IX

Helen was six months old before she was named. She was born in the flat on Eleventh Street, to which Albert had taken his pregnant Brünnhilde in the fall following what he had one day labelled the immaculate seduction scene. The first week or so after she came he called his daughter nothing at all; of a morning, sometimes early, usually late, he would leap out of bed, get dressed in five minutes and leave for the little restaurant down the street to get his rolls and coffee. He would find a moment though to stop at the crib, pull down the blanket and take a look. “At last I know what obscenity is,” he would say; or perhaps, “No wonder they invented maternal love, it would be either that or manslaughter.”

This baby had been easy, almost too easy, Lora thought; the third day she had got her own breakfast and lunch, and now from the little kitchen she would call indifferently:

“Don’t pretend, Albert dear; if she’s as bad as that why do you take the trouble to look at her? Remember what you told me, one should have the courage of one’s emotions.”

And he would call back:

“Don’t get analytical, Lora mia, it’s not your line. Where the hell is my necktie? As a physical fact I’m a father; as a further physical fact this thing in here is a complicated worm. You might at least buy it a wig. So long — I’m off.”

A month later he was calling it Paula; after Saint Paul, he explained, a tribute from fornication to its first great antagonist. Others would make rival claims, he said, Buddha for instance; but Buddha was no antagonist of anything, merely he was lazy, he wanted a good excuse to go off and sit down somewhere.

But Lora objected. She didn’t like Paula; it sounded too much like a boy with curls. Almost anything else.

“All right,” Albert grinned, “then Fornica. Not so bad. Fornica Winter Scher. Fornica darling. Fornica Scher.”

“Winter.”

“Why not keep the Scher? It’s usual. You’ll get along lots better in this world if you respect the conventions.”

“You’re an awful fool. I’ll name her myself.”

Anne Seaver, over from Brooklyn one day, called her Baba, and that stuck for several months, until Albert finally declared he could no longer bear it because it made him think of Sir Joshua Reynolds; this went unexplained. Besides, Baba was extraordinary.

“The trick in naming children,” he said, “is to avoid all distinctive flavor. Sink them at once into the universal mire and they’re much less apt to get disturbing ideas. The ideal way would be to call all boys Tom and all girls Helen; indeed, when certain present tendencies reach their destined goal even that distinction will disappear and everybody can be called Sam. We shall discount the inevitable and call her Sam.”

“We shall not. I hate girls having boys’ names.”

“At least halfway then; Helen.”

Lora sighed; at last that was over. She might have known better in the first place than to let him get started on it.

She had admitted to herself long since that Albert was rather beyond her. That first night he had slept in her room she had decided that he was like all other men, calculable to the extent of his desires, but then another complication arose: what was that extent? He really did seem to have some sort of desire beyond the food he ate and the love he took and the fun of making himself felt on other people. He put up that claim; she got those phrases from him. What was that desire, she asked him once, during those first two months when they spent every night together in the narrow bed that made them sleep stretched out close, their bodies touching at each slight movement. The desire to die intact, he replied; and then said he was too sleepy to talk about it and it didn’t matter anyway.

When he learned she was pregnant — she waited three months to tell him — he insisted that she stop work at once. She might as well, he declared, for pretty soon she would have to, no one would want her. She protested that she had got her first job, with Palichak, less than two months before Roy was born, but he dismissed that as a special case. What the deuce, he said, he might or might not be able to support the child of his loins after it was born, but he certainly would manage to get it that far.

“You didn’t want it,” said Lora.

“Perfectly indifferent,” he declared. “I did think I was taking precautions, but only because it is old-fashioned not to. I don’t mind a bit, so long as you understand my attitude.”

It was a little after that that he took the flat on Eleventh Street; he had a little furniture of his own, and Lora took the few pieces she had bought: the crib and the carriage, of course, and the easy chair and the screen with a hole in it. They bought a new bed, a big wide one with coiled springs and a new mattress. Lora said nothing of the money she had in the savings bank — a new crib was going to be needed, and lots of other things. She was ready also to yield to his insistence on a doctor instead of a midwife, though she doubted if it would make any difference; it was in there, and it had to come out, and that was all there was to it.

Distinctly she did not want Albert any more. She still liked to hear him talk and have him around, and it was convenient that he was often ready to take Roy somewhere or stay with him when she needed to go shopping, but she wished they had separate beds. She didn’t mind him really; she just didn’t want him. The chief trouble was the necessity of concealing her indifference and coldness, for she felt she owed that to him. Not wanting to hurt his feelings, she used the old gestures and phrases and accepted the old refinements and ingenuities, and it was really quite a bore. At length she decided that he must be the most insensitive of men; otherwise, in spite of her pretenses, he would have felt her detachment. But no, his groping hand still trembled and he still gasped, afterwards, flung away from her and his voice thick with satisfaction, “Let there be peace.”

But one night in her sixth month with his child she heard suddenly out of the dark, long after she thought he had gone to sleep:

“Listen, Lora mia, I’m going to speak and you are not to answer. I know Venus is dead. You’ve been very sweet about it. But it gets too painful; we might as well give it up. I said to myself, by god, she shall shudder once, she shall push my hand away, she shall turn her back on me, at the very least I shall feel her flesh minutely withdraw in spite of the will of her muscles. But you’re too much for me; I realize it at last, you’re pure prostitute, the only one possibly in existence, and I had to find you. I’m very fond of you, Lora mia, let’s forget our little tournament and go to sleep.”

“Albert, you don’t—”

“You’re not to answer.”

“You don’t realize when a woman is pregnant—”

“Blah. Superstition. I’m serious, really. You are not to answer. I beg you, spare me that.”

He found her hand under the covers, took it to his lips and kissed it; then, with a grunt, turned on his side with his back to her. Well, she thought, I might have known I wasn’t fooling him; and turned on her own side away from him, and they both slept.

Difficulties about money did not begin until Helen was several months old. That was summer; Roy’s third birthday was in July, and when Lora went to the grocer’s or the meat market he would trot along beside the carriage with one hand on its rim and in the other a bag of fruit or vegetables. He paid little attention to the baby except when an opportunity for action presented itself; he loved to hold the towel in readiness when it was having its daily bath, and out shopping, when Lora entered a store he would stay on the sidewalk with the carriage, to keep off dogs and other dangerous animals, he explained. He had already been to the zoo several times with Albert, and stood ready, he announced, to repel anything from a beaver to a giraffe.

It was around this time that Lora asked Albert one day if he would go with her to a photographer and have his picture taken with the children. He regarded her in amazement, actually speechless, unable to believe his ears.

“Not me, just you and the babies,” she explained.

“My god,” he cried, “and I thought I knew you clear to the bottom! You can’t mean this, it must be the heat. Flatly, no. I’ll stand on my head, I’ll roll a hoop in Washington Square, but I’m damned if I’ll have my picture taken with two infants.”

“Please, I don’t often ask you—”

“Not a chance.”

She levelled her eyes on him:

“You must, Albert. I want to send it to my father and mother.”

She had never before mentioned their existence. He looked at her a moment and then said, “I see. They do have fathers, don’t they?” Suddenly he grinned, “When were we married, Lora mia? Judging from Roy, it must have been about a year before I first saw you, Venus gravida, against the purple curtain—”

“All right, forget it,” she said shortly.

“But you do intend to exhibit a husband?”

“Of course not; you don’t know what you’re talking about. Let it go, forget it.”

“By no means; you excite my curiosity. I’ll do it if not gladly at least hopefully; if I submit to this degradation maybe some day you’ll tell me all about it.”

But she never did, though she got the picture; three different poses, of which she chose one with Helen seated on Albert’s knee and Roy leaning against the arm of his chair. The photographer was almost incapacitated with bewilderment at her refusal — mother, obviously, he saw — to make the group complete.

At that several weeks passed before she actually did get it, for lack of money to pay for it. Gradually money was becoming her one important concern; all her savings were gone, and Albert’s weekly seventy dollars was developing an elusive quality which he could not comprehend and she could not control. He dined in the flat only once or twice a week; more than half of his nights were spent elsewhere; that’s all right, it’s none of my business, she thought, but what am I going to do? She could, she supposed, go back to the studios, it would be possible to get someone like Eileen to look after the children, but she had been away from it a long time and she had never really liked it. Almost certainly, though, it would before long have become unavoidable if one autumn day Albert had not happened upon Max Kadish in an uptown gallery and brought him home to where Lora sat placid and smiling with Helen at her breast.

Even at times when the rent was long past due and Mr. Halpern at the grocery store had begun to take on a doubtful and reluctant air, she was not genuinely concerned. This mildly puzzled her; was it because she had Roy and Helen, she wondered; but no, that should work the other way — she had good cause to be worried with two small children to care for and Albert already more than halfway out of the straitjacket she had made for him. I’m getting old and sensible, she thought, it’s about time; nothing is worth worrying about; something always happens. Look at the day Steve left; that was difficult enough, desperate even, but how nicely it all came out! Or the day, nearly five years ago, she first arrived in New York...

But that was different. That wasn’t really a question of money, though she hadn’t had much. She remembered the exact amount: seventy-two dollars and forty cents; she had counted it on the train after it had passed the station at One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street. Forty-three cents really, but she had spent the pennies for an evening paper at Grand Central and had decided that it shouldn’t be figured as part of her New York capital. She had calculated that at eighteen dollars a week she had enough for four weeks, and certainly it shouldn’t take a whole month to find some way of making a living.

But that hadn’t really been a question of money. In the first place she had been ill, frightfully ill. During the five-hour ride to Chicago she had had no thought of that; she had felt it but not thought about it, keeping herself back in the darkest corner of the car she could find with her coat collar turned up and her tam o’ shanter pulled clear down to her eyes, afraid to look up, terrified lest at any moment she might feel a hand on her arm and hear a familiar voice or the tone of authority. Only one thought was in her mind: she would not go back. Everything else was excluded from consciousness to keep her will clear and strong on that: no matter what happened, no matter who found her or what they said or did, she would not under any circumstances whatever go back. She wouldn’t tell why not, she would never tell anyone that, but rather than go back she would throw herself off the train.

When the train finally stopped at the Chicago terminal and she arose to file out with the other passengers, her knees trembled so she could not stand without holding to the back of the seat. She knew that the chief danger was here. If they had wired or telephoned there would be policemen outside, and they would spot her at once. They had no right, but they wouldn’t listen to her. She was of age, wasn’t she? Was she? She was twenty. Was it eighteen or twenty-one? She wished she knew. Directly in front of her was a middle-aged well-dressed woman with greying hair; Lora seized her arm and when the woman turned, startled, shot at her in a breath, “Listen, I’ve got to know quick, when is a girl of age, eighteen or twenty-one—” The woman jerked away and made no reply whatever.

I’m making a fool of myself, go to hell, Lora thought, and climbed down the steps of the car to the platform. At the gate at the platform’s end was a waiting throng; she saw uniforms, she thought, but walked straight through with her chin up and was not stopped. In the station she conquered the impulse to break into a run; and a few moments later, safely in the taxicab, she first became aware that she was in fact ill, almost to the point of collapse. It was a terrifying and overwhelming wave of physical despair, worse than any pain; her nerves and muscles and veins were giving way, impersonally and inevitably, like a beam subjected to a load beyond the maximum calculations of the engineers. She might die, that was all right. But also she might not die; the cab driver might find her helpless and insensible there on the seat, and somehow they’d find out who she was and send her back. Was there anything in her purse that would tell them? She would throw it out of the window, at once, while she could still move. Then what, with her money gone? Give him the address of the apartment, where Cecelia was? Ha, she was not such a fool. She bent over double, with her head touching her knees, by instinct or pure luck, for that brought a sharp stabbing pain that roused her and made her gasp. When the taxi reached its destination and the driver opened the door she was sitting up straight with her clenched fists in her lap. She got her purse open and handed him some bills.

“Will you get me a ticket to New York on the next train,” she said.

He kept his squinting knowing eyes on her.

“The next one’s more than an hour,” he said. “Seven-twenty. It’s no good. The fast ones are all gone.”

“And a lower berth,” she said. “I don’t feel very well. I want a lower berth.”

He made no reply, but turned and disappeared into the station. A few minutes later he came out again and handed her the tickets and change; she put them carefully in her purse and closed it.

“Can I wait here till it goes?” she said.

“Sure, in the waiting room. They got seats, and there’s a place you can lay down.”

“I mean here in the cab.”

“Sure, if you pay for it. There won’t be no heat though with the engine off.”

“How much?”

“Three dollars.”

She decided it was worth it; she couldn’t risk the waiting room. Twice during the hour and a half she felt herself going again; each time she tried the trick of doubling over with her head on her knees, and was convulsed back into life. When the driver finally opened the door she let him help her out and held his arm through the station and down the platform clear to the steps of the pullman. There he turned her over to the porter, squinted at her, “Good luck, lady,” and went off shaking his head. The porter asked her doubtfully if she wanted the berth made up at once; she nodded and sank into a seat at the end of the car. A little later he came for her and helped her down the aisle; she was dimly aware that the train had begun to move and that other passengers were staring at her. Sprawled out in the berth, face down, with all her clothes on, she heard a man’s voice, in a moment of extreme clearness that came just before consciousness departed, asking the porter if a glass of brandy might not be helpful to the lady in lower six. But some time later, she did not know when, only it seemed like the middle of the night, she came to again, half freezing. She got her dress and shoes and stockings off, and the porter brought extra blankets. Interminably she lay under them numb as ice, not suffering for she was not feeling anything; but at length she got frightened and called the porter again and told him desperately that of course he did not have a hot water bag. He disappeared and soon returned with one so hot she could not touch it, wrapped in a towel. As its warmth called her blood back to duty her body, relinquishing by slow degrees its tenseness, ached and throbbed in protest; for hours, it seemed to her, it fought against renascence, then gradually it surrendered, relaxed completely, and she slept.

Late the next afternoon — early evening, rather, for the eager January darkness had fallen three hours before — she stood in the middle of the vast hall of Grand Central Station. There were no seats. A porter directed her to the waiting room, and there she sank into a vacant corner of a bench and turned to the list of furnished rooms in the newspaper she had just bought. She had resolved not to waste money on a hotel even for one night. Not many rooms were listed, and she decided she hadn’t got the right paper; in Chicago, she remembered, it was the Globe. However, one of these would probably do; too bad she knew nothing about neighborhoods. Didn’t railroad stations in big cities have bureaux of information where you could ask questions like that? She twisted around on the bench to look for signs, then suddenly came back again straight front and sat quite still.

If it hurt her like that again she would scream or faint.

She decided all at once, calmly, that a furnished room was out of the question. So was a hotel. She was damn good and sick and there was no use being stupid about it. For a single instant she was overwhelmed by the flash of an amazing suspicion: was there another one inside of her? Or maybe it had never really come out, maybe she had been wrong all the way through...

No, this was different, totally different. If she didn’t watch out she’d get hysterical and be no better than a lunatic. This was different; she was just sick. She sat a long while, considering, laboriously calculating this chance and that; then she opened her purse and removed each object from it, one by one, inspecting each in its turn and making a pile of them on the bench beside her. When she was through and the purse was empty she returned to it all but three things: a letter in an envelope, a printed card, and a little silver-backed mirror with initials engraved on it, LW. These she grasped in one hand, placed the purse securely under one arm, and walked down the aisle until she found a refuse can over against the wall. In it, into the midst of a pile of old newspapers and orange-skins, she deposited the envelope and card and mirror. Then she stopped a passing porter and asked to be directed to the bureau of information.

One of the men at the little circular desk in the middle of the vast hall looked up at her wearily.

“I’m sick and I’ve got to go to a hospital,” she said. “What do I do?”

He looked slightly wearier. “Travellers’ Aid second room through there,” he said, pointing. Then he straightened up and called past her shoulder, “Hey, take this lady to Travellers’ Aid.”

The redcap preceded her, walking so fast she almost lost him in the crowd. At the desk in the second room he touched his cap and left her. A man and woman were behind the desk, talking.

“I want to go to a hospital,” Lora said.

The woman looked at her. “What’s the trouble?”

“I’m sick and I haven’t any money.”

“You’re sick all right,” said the man.

“A charity ward is pretty bad,” said the woman. “Haven’t you any friends or relatives in the city? Do you know what it is that’s wrong?”

“Please don’t make me talk,” Lora pleaded. “Just send me to the nearest hospital. I have no friends.”

“I can’t do that till I know what’s wrong with you. Were you on a train?”

“Yes. I had a miscarriage on a train. Please hurry. Please let me sit down. The charity ward’s all right.”

“Have you got enough money to pay for a taxi?”

“Yes. Please hurry.”

The man had come through the desk gate and was standing beside her. “I’ll run her up to Presbyterian,” he said.

“I’ll have to phone first,” said the woman.

“You can phone after we’re gone. If you phone now they’ll say take her to Bellevue. She don’t want to go to Bellevue.”

“Ha, I know, it doesn’t matter about the old ugly ones,” said the woman.

“Please,” Lora said.

The man took her arm. “This way, the taxis are this way,” he said.

She was in the hospital three weeks. It was an acute inflammation, they told her, and that was all she ever learned about it, for she didn’t want to ask questions. Nor would she answer any: at first she refused even to give her name, then when they insisted on that and other details she invented one, Mary Scott she told them, but that was as far as she would go. Her home? Was she married? What train had she been on? Who was to be notified in case of emergency? Not bothering to argue, she merely smiled and shook her head until officially they gave it up. Thus without identity, invulnerable to official curiosity, she became mysterious: obviously either criminal or sublime. The nurses glanced at her speculatively as they passed, and the internes on their rounds lingered at her bedside. There she was, a perverse fish on a bank, flopped by her own will out of the soothing oblivious stream of history; it was at once offensive and fascinating. There were no more princesses, but she might be almost anything else. The petty and desperate insistence of society that no one under any circumstances shall lose his tag kept her on the defense up to the very minute she walked out of the hospital doors.

Even Dr. Nielsen, who saw her every day for the first week because her condition required it, and thereafter because she had aroused his interest, joined mildly in the hunt. “Come,” he said, “we know you haven’t told the truth. You couldn’t have had a miscarriage on the train. I’m discreet and it needn’t go on the records; you’d better tell me. In fact, Hornsby suggests that the circumstances require a report to the police. I’m not trying to frighten you; I talked him out of it.”

“Thank you, thank you so much,” Lora smiled. But she told Dr. Nielsen no more of her past than any of the others.

It was he who solved her immediate and pressing problem, when she was well enough to leave, by getting a job for her through a friend of his who was a high official in the export sales department of the Federal Oil Company. Later, presumably, through that friend, if he was still curious, he learned at least her true name, for she decided to use it on the application form that was given her to fill out; but she never saw Dr. Nielsen again. From her brief local eminence as an insolent rebel against the demands of social responsibility, she was swallowed into the churning amorphous mass of a metropolitan digestive apparatus that assimilates daily much tougher and more unlikely material than a redheaded good-looking girl.

From nine till twelve-thirty and from one-thirty till five she sat at a telephone switchboard, and twice each month received the sum of fifty-five dollars. That was on account of the war, the other girls told her; three years before it would have been only forty. She had a room on West Thirty-fourth Street, a neat clean little room with a view of the river from the window. She ate breakfast there, an apple and a roll and milk; lunch was provided for its employees by the company, at cost they said with dignity; and for dinner she went usually to a little place not far from her room where they had good soup and plenty of bread and butter.

Five evenings a week she went to a business school. Dr. Nielsen’s friend, Mr. Pitkin, the high official, had said that if she learned stenography he would see that she was given a chance to get ahead; that offered the best opportunity, he explained. His secretary, who had been a stenographer only twelve years, got twenty-eight hundred a year. Good god, twelve years, Lora thought. Twelve years! Incredible; even more incredible that the secretary, a plump efficient person with intelligent brown eyes, looked contented, lively, and not at all decrepit. In twelve years, Lora reflected, she would be thirty-two. Well. At any rate she might as well learn it; she had to acquire some sort of competence beyond sticking brass pegs in little holes.

She did not at all know, that spring and summer, what she was looking forward to. But forward she must and would look, there was to be no glancing backward, no examination of that scar. Sometimes at night before she went to sleep it would be suddenly upon her like a flood, overwhelming her; her father’s presence and voice, her mother’s pallor and tears, Pete Halliday’s irresistible smile, all in a jumble, defying chronology, merging into a thick vapor of misery that for the moment overpowered her brain and stifled her. She would not fight it, feeling it was useless. She would lie on her back in the dark, perfectly still, her arms straight at her sides, thinking, it will go away, it might as well go away, for I’m not afraid of it and I’m not going to think about it. Some day someone is going to pay for it, that’s all. You’ll see.

Pete was dead probably. She had heard nothing, but he had been in the war over a year — angrily she stopped herself, What did it matter whether Pete was dead or not? No more of that.

Jostled by a passerby on the sidewalk one August evening, walking home from the office, to her astonishment she became suddenly aware that the daydream she had been bumped out of was a baby cradled in her arms. For ten blocks she had been carrying a baby, now in her arms, now inside of her, now beside her in bed nestling against her. Tommyrot! she exploded. Imbecile! That’s a swell idea, that is. Oh, grand. You damn fool. But before she got home the baby was back again, and this time she merely smiled at herself. Why not, if it’s fun, she thought. Sure it’s silly, but anything to amuse a poor girl alone in a great city. After that she accepted it whenever it came, and it came more and more often; rarely did she walk home without it. Idle at the switchboard she would sometimes be startled by the buzzer out of that dream; once at school in the evening the instructor asked her a question three times before she heard it.

Partly it was the evenings at school that kept her from seeing more of the other girls outside of the office, but even when some of them arranged a Saturday night movie party or a Sunday trip to the seashore she usually did not care to go. They decided she was snooty, but she was scarcely aware of it, and certainly was unconcerned. She liked to sew, and made most of her clothes; the movies bored her. Her chief diversions were sewing and reading and automobile riding; the last she loved, but she got more invitations than she cared to accept. She went now and then on a Sunday trip with a handsome youth who was Mr. Pitkin’s assistant, once or twice with a man named Gilstairs, an office manager from the floor below, and somewhat oftener with Steve Adams, one of the field men who had been called in from Canada a year after the war started and was now at the desk of one of the department heads who had enlisted. Around thirty, erect and slender, not much taller than Lora, personable and well-featured save for a nose slightly too flat and muddy brown eyes that never quite opened, he continuously smoked cigarettes and carried in his watch case a photograph of his mother taken many years before; this he had shown to Lora at their second meeting.

There was something about Steve she did not entirely like, something in him that seemed to be saying, be careful, don’t hurt me or I’ll run. That was the impression she got, though she didn’t put it into words; what she knew was that she was always a little ill at ease with him. On the other hand there was something pleasing in his quiet manner, his courtesy in little things, his disinclination to take anything for granted, so that she enjoyed being with him more than with Gilstairs, for instance, who apparently proceeded on the theory that a slight initial propulsion is all that is required for the development of an emotional avalanche. Although this did not frighten Lora it annoyed her; after two experiments she let him apply his theory elsewhere.

What was Steve afraid of, she wondered. He wasn’t exactly shy, she couldn’t call him timid, but when she was with him she was always aware of a sense of fragility, of a necessity to avoid with more than ordinary care the danger of intrusion into forbidden places. There was nothing concrete about it; his warnings were conveyed so subtly that it was impossible to put your finger on one and say, why did he do that? In fact, as Lora grew to know him better she became fairly persuaded that it was all her imagination.

He offered no caresses or solicitations, but as time went on he showed a growing tendency to talk intimately about himself. Lora, he said, was the only girl he had ever known with whom he felt he could talk freely. He stated categorically that he was sexually a virgin, using that word, virgin, which Lora thought absurd and amusing. He had often thought of marriage, but there had been two obstacles: first, no girl had ever sufficiently attracted him; and second, his mother. Was she so opposed to it, Lora asked, because his pause seemed to invite a question. Oh, no, by no means, not at all, he replied; but it had always seemed to him that one of the most important functions of a mother was to set a standard by which other girls and women could be measured, and he had the fortune, good or bad, to have thus acquired a standard that was all but unattainable. His mother had faults of course, for instance she was a little too tolerant of masculine peccadilloes among friends and acquaintances, but doubtless without a slight blemish here and there she would have been unendurable in her perfection. His father was dead, Lora somehow supposed, but it appeared not; he was in fact very much alive, a professor in a technical college who had made quite a name for himself in a minor sort of way. Brothers or sisters? No. None. He returned to marriage. It was really terrifying, he said, to think of marriage. Not on account of the involvement of sex, not at all; though he had never experienced it he had no reason to suppose that he was any different from other men in that respect, and he had yet to learn that any healthy man had died of it; no, the trouble with marriage was its finality; in spite of divorce laws it was in its nature irrevocable. Lora asked what about children, and he looked at her as if he had never heard of such a thing; she had a queer feeling that he was going to begin talking about storks. But it appeared that in connection with this subject children simply had never occurred to him; he seemed quite startled and upset, as if an Einstein had introduced a new and disturbing element into his most searching and abstruse calculations.

He returned to the topic on various occasions. He often referred, as to something which others might deprecate but which he was prepared to defend and justify, to his own lack of experience with sex; and one day he said to her point-blank:

“Of course I don’t suppose you’ve had any either.”

At last he’s asked it, Lora thought; he’s been wanting to know that for three months.

“Yes,” she replied calmly and readily, “I have.”

“Oh,” was all he said. She could see his suddenly flushed face in the bright glare of a streetlight beside which they had stopped; they were on their way home from a Sunday at one of the Long Island beaches and were now in a solid endless line of traffic near the approach to Queensboro Bridge. The smell and noise and confusion engulfed them.

After a while he spoke again:

“I mean really. You know, really.”

“I know. Yes, I have.”

“Often?”

She laughed at him, without replying.

“Of course it’s none of my business,” he said after a silence. “But I’ve told you all about myself, you know it’s not just curiosity. No one has more respect for women than I have. You might think I might respect you less, but I certainly would not. I don’t put myself up to judge anybody, especially if I don’t know all the circumstances. My mother taught me that, she’s more tolerant than I am even. I don’t respect you a bit less.”

After another long silence, a little island of silence in the midst of the bridge’s uproar, he asked suddenly:

“Was it one of the fellows at the office?”

This is beginning to get irritating, thought Lora, this is plenty for one day. “No, it wasn’t,” she said shortly. “And if you don’t mind I’d rather talk of something else.”

“All right.” After another pause he resumed, as they swung into Sixtieth Street, “I do want to be sure though that you don’t misunderstand my — my motives. With me it isn’t a matter of respect at all, it’s just ignorance. There doesn’t seem to me to be anything — well — unclean about it. I won’t talk about it any more.”

A few days later, at lunch — for he had recently acquired the habit of asking her several times a week to lunch with him — he announced that the relation of lover and mistress appeared to him the ideal solution of the problem of sex. It certainly was capable of being a perfectly honorable relation, the French had proved that, he asserted; and added with a smile that while he was in no position to set himself up as an authority still he had thought about it a lot and it seemed to him amply demonstrable. The main thing was mutual respect, the circumstances had to be such that there could be no question about that. Didn’t Lora agree with him? Of course. Probably half the girls in the office were no better than they should be — that is, he explained hastily, from the conventional viewpoint. And the men, not one of them was pure, absolutely not one. You could tell from the way they talked. As for the physical experience, that was to be expected, even a reputable doctor would admit that the physical experience was healthy and natural and in a way inevitable; but the way they talked was disgusting. Of course they didn’t all have mistresses; the married ones had wives, which was just as good for those who were built that way; and many of the others were engaged in a sort of haphazard prowling and ambushing which to him seemed inhuman and indefensible.

At the end, after he had paid the check, not looking at Lora but busy ostentatiously with counting his change and getting it put away, he asked her to dine with him the following evening. She replied that he knew very well she couldn’t; what about her school?

“Saturday then,” he said, still not looking at her.

“I don’t know,” she said doubtfully. “I’d counted on sewing; I’ve been out so much recently I’ve nothing fit to wear. I think I’d better not.”

“I’d love to buy you a dress,” he declared.

She stared at him, and he blushed to his ears, but he said manfully:

“Please come Saturday.”

“Maybe,” she said. “I’ll let you know tomorrow.”