MINIFY LOOKED UP, ready to be pleased. On his desk two Christmas packages, stiff with glassy red bows, caught the morning sunlight. A dozen letters, their engraved tops concealed by the addressed envelopes slipped over their edges, lay before him. He shoved them back. On the side of the desk the advance issue of Smith’s, stamped MAKE READY, caught his eye. He shoved that aside, too.
“Must be good,” he said. “You sounded top of the world on the phone.”
“Yeah.” Phil’s voice was quiet. Minify was no man to “sell” an idea to; you just told him about it. “Remember I said I’d fall on my face before I’d put Professor Lieberman or anybody else through a quiz about this?” He saw Minify nod. “I guess this goes back to that reluctance. And that sense that I’d have to go at it from inside.”
Minify’s whole attention was on him.
“Anyway, I got—hell, let me just give you the title for the series.” He waited while Minify clicked up a switch to the interoffice communicator and said, “No calls, Mary.” When the switch went down again, Phil said, without emphasis, “I was Jewish for three months.”
Minify was reaching for a cigarette. His hand stopped on the way to the package.
“Christ, Phil.” He hitched himself forward in his chair.
“Or six weeks or however long, till I get the feel of it.” He saw Minify’s lips repeating the title, testing it; saw his eyes go to the cover of the make-ready, visualizing it there.
“It’s a hell of a stunt, Phil.”
“Usually these ‘I’ titles give me a pain. But there’s such a wallop to this one.” Minify nodded. “It won’t be just the same,” Phil added, “but some of it will.”
Again Minify nodded. He looked at Phil thoughtfully. “I knew you’d get the series going somehow, in spite of the sticky start. I didn’t think—but who’d ever think of this? Can you get away with it?”
“If you and Mrs. Minify and Kathy won’t give me away. I haven’t told Kathy yet, but I bet—”
Minify took over. For unbroken stretches he explored the possibilities, a fever of planning in him. Then he fell silent, to listen to Phil. For half an hour they mapped out a campaign to follow, always allowing for the improvising Phil would have to do as he went along. Clubs, resorts, apartment leases, social life. Interviews for jobs, applications to medical schools. Perhaps some trips to “trouble spots” that came into the news. Getting to know people of all types in New York. “That’ll be the toughest part for me,” Phil remarked. “I’m not gregarious by nature. But O.K.” And when at last both of them were skimmed clean of their top ideas, Phil stretched. He felt good.
“There won’t be one bloody thing that’ll be news about clubs and jobs and hotels,” he said. “I might chuck all that stuff except for the subjective reactions.”
“Any way you want. When do you start?”
“What’s the matter with now? I told you I wanted to work in the office for a while—I’ll get it going right here.”
Minify reached toward the buzzer but drew back without touching it. “Remember you said nobody’d read the goddam things?”
“They’ll read this.”
“Damn right they will.”
They grinned at each other, and Phil said, “Well, I’ll report progress once in a while.”
Minify said, “Any time,” and tapped the buzzer. Mary Cresson, his middle-aged secretary who had followed him from job to job, came in, her book and pencil ready.
“Mary, Mr. Green’s going to work inside a couple of weeks. Maybe more. Get Jordan to fix him up, will you?”
“Mr. Kingland’s office is empty.”
“Fine.”
“I’ll go along with you,” Phil said.
But outside the door, he heard, “Hey, Phil,” and went back again. John had pulled back the sheaf of letters and had his pen ready for signing them.
“Dig up a working title, will you?” he said. “For the file we keep on Futures.”
“Right.”
“We won’t tell the real one to anybody at all; it’d give your show away around here.”
“What about just scheduling it as ‘Antisemitism in the U.S.’?”
John jotted it down. “And what about help? Secretary for all the letters and phone calls on it?”
“I hadn’t thought. I’ve never had help.”
“Might as well have a girl assigned, part-time probably. Somebody good. She’d have to know too, wouldn't she?”
“Why?” They each thought about it. “Can’t see why even she should know a damn thing about it. Suppose I were really Jewish and you’d given me this assignment? What difference would it make to her or anybody?”
“Sure. You’re right.” Again he tapped the buzzer. “Mary, check secretarial, would you, and assign a smart girl to Mr. Green for as much time as he’ll need?”
“Yes, Mr. Minify.”
“No hurry about it,” Phil said. “I always make a lot of notes first.”
But when he went to the office that was to be his, he made no effort to get started on his notes. It was a pleasant, two-windowed room, facing south. The austere shaft of the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center was right in front of him, a little to the left. Against the gray of the winter sky, it stood like some monolith, unravageable. He stayed at the window, looking at it, and then sat down at his desk.
From beyond the partition came guffaws of sudden laughter. “Somebody’s told a dirty story,” he decided, and smiled, too. Next door was the art department, Miss Cresson had told him. That meant loud discussions, many visitors, arguments. He knew. But when he was working well, noise never bothered him.
He tried the typewriter. He called an office boy and sent for stationery, pencils, ink, clips, a jar of rubber cement, and a pair of long shears.
“I’m one of those guys that paste in added paragraphs or rewrites,” he explained to the surprised face. “Scotch tape’ll do if there’s no cement.”
But after the supplies had come, he still made no motion to begin work. Lazily he gave himself over to remembering last night. For two hours more he and Kathy had talked of themselves, in the halting half-openness that was all the openness possible during beginnings. No matter how direct and free you wished to make every sentence, and they had each wished it, there were all the blocks that kept standing up, barricades to full revelation. Once, at the fireplace with his back half turned to her, he’d managed to get out one of the things that pressed hardest to be said.
“I’m one of those solemn guys, I guess. You know—always fine to get in the hay, but a wife’s what I’m really hoping for sometime.”
And from behind him, uncertain, troubled, she’d answered, “Anybody does. A wife, or a husband. If it turns out that way.”
He’d never heard that note in her voice. She’d always seemed so unruffled and sure, the way she had when she’d hit the wrong keys at the piano. But last night, after she’d said that, he’d wondered whether there weren’t sad dark places that she stumbled through in her mind as there were in his.
“Any woman would rather be married,” she’d gone on, “but if it’s been a mistake once, you’re afraid.”
He’d taken her into his arms then, just holding her. She said nothing, nor did he. Yet each of them—he had felt it— each, in a secret and separate cave of emotion, was considering the words, married, wife, husband. He had kissed her again, and suddenly, this time, something was promised between them. He had become sure, violently sure, that the moment would come when they’d be in bed together. Not yet. Not for a while. But sometime.
Remembering now, he shoved his chair back from the desk and went back to the window. It had just begun to snow. There was no wind, and these first flakes floated on the tranquil air. Delight stirred in him, memory of the glee he’d always felt with the first snow as a child in Minnesota. The long, impatient wait was at last rewarded—the sled ready on the back porch could at last be used. There was always a kind of victory to it. One had always waited so long.
“I’ve waited so long.”
He was seeing her again tonight. He never had got around to telling her what he was going to do. Two or three times she’d tried to bring him back to the series, but he couldn’t make the transition to the impersonal world of ideas. That first talking to each other on the level of feeling and not of biography was too engrossing. That first realizing that she wanted him to kiss her, as he wanted her, was too heady. He’d been afraid to shift their mood. “This isn’t the time to talk about work,” he’d said. “I’ll save it for tomorrow.”
The office door opened. Mary Cresson put her head in.
“Mr. Minify wondered if you’d like to have luncheon with him and Frank Tingler and Bert McAnny?”
“Yes, sure.” He glanced at his watch. “Who’s Bert McAnny?” Tingler was fiction editor, he knew from the masthead.
“Assistant to Bill Jayson, the art editor. He’d only been here a while before he got drafted, but they gave him his old job back, anyway. About one, then.”
This would be the start. This would be the chance to get it across—how, he didn’t know. You didn’t blurt it out; it had to come up. If it didn’t come up, you made it come up. There’d be something that would lead into it. His heart began to pound as if he were going into an unaccustomed place where there was sure to be danger. But his mind felt ready and impatient.
Anne Dettrey was at their table, too. She was woman’s editor, though there were no recipe and fashion departments in the magazine. Her province was nonfiction of special interest to women readers, and Phil knew, though he didn’t remember how he knew, that she was one of the top editors on the staff. As John had come by with the two men, he’d said, “I’ve asked Anne Dettrey to come along, Phil,” and there’d been a blur of how-do-you-do’s all round, as Minify did introductions.
“Phil?” she’d said. “I thought it was Schuyler Green.”
“That’s my writing name.”
Through the shoptalk of the first part of the meal, he’d thought, That’s the way you do it. Lie when you have to, but for the most part, it’ll be as much what you leave out as what you put in. There was no lie in leaving out the explanation about “Schuyler.” Just let them assume he’d made up a pseudonym cold.
She was a woman about his own age, this Anne Dettrey. She talked well, turning the kind of phrases you found in slick fiction and never heard in real speech, yet so effortlessly that she seemed natural always. She had a rather long, clearly boned face, and she was almost as tall as he was. Her reddish hair and brown eyes compelled the attention, though you’d never call her pretty. Because they’d all plunged, even as they were walking over to the restaurant, into some question about the issue going to press next week, he’d had time to orient himself to all of them.
The short, pale man was Tingler. He was middle-aged and ugly, with thick-lensed glasses over protruding eyes that probably meant hyperthyroid. His voice was calm always, almost bored, even when the others were pitched up on some question or other. He was a competent one, clearly. McAnny was a youngster, not out of his twenties. Phil saw the discharge button in his lapel. He’d never worn his own, or the ribbon. But Bert McAnny, with his small features and light voice, would wear his for a long time. There was too much awe in him as he listened to Minify’s words. He was flushing now as he asked the editor about “the time you decided to change Smith’s into a liberal magazine.”
“It wasn’t that way at all, Bert. I didn’t.” Minify smiled, but above his genial mouth the gray eyes were thoughtful. “Fact is, when they offered me this job as editor in chief, I said if they were out to run a liberal magazine, quote, quote, I wasn’t their man.”
“You?”
The sharp inflection from Phil and McAnny pleased Minify. Anne and Frank Tingler showed no surprise. They’d been on the staff since John had taken over. Phil had read about how he’d gone to Smith’s. Way back, he’d been one of the best reporters on the old World, in the days when a by-line was a badge and not just an automatic gadget. After the World had folded, he’d knocked about on other papers without finding himself right on any of them. He’d gone abroad, free-lanced foreign stuff for magazines, and returned, surprisingly enough, to become managing editor of one of the folksier women’s magazines. But he’d increased its circulation from the first year. When Smith’s, along with three other magazines, had changed ownership in 1940, Minify had become editor in chief. In a year, Smith’s circulation jumped thirty per cent; in another, thirty more. The three other magazines had been abandoned, their paper allotments going into this one weekly. By now its circulation was more than double what it had been when he’d taken the reins.
“Sure, I did,” Minify went on. “You don’t get anywhere with that for a platform.”
“How do you mean?” McAnny asked.
“Ever hear of anybody calling a bunch of guys together and saying, ‘Let’s run a reactionary magazine’?” He laughed. “It’s never like that—they get together to run a successful magazine. If they’re mostly reactionary themselves, it turns out reactionary. Same thing the other way around.”
“I never thought of it that way,” McAnny said.
“I took this job with one idea—to make a go of it. It’s been a go because the readers like our stories and serials and pictures and articles. It’s true I don’t hire reactionary guys—I’d just fight with them all the time if I did. So with the staff we’ve got, we generally manage to be on the liberal side. But that’s all the trick there is to it—not a conscious line you take.”
“What about your decision to run a series like the one I’m starting?” Phil said. He did it deliberately. He couldn’t let this whole luncheon go by without managing to take his first step.
“What’re you doing, Mr. Green?” That was Anne Dettrey, but the others had turned to him also.
“Good case in point,” Minify answered for him. “Phil’s going to do a series on antisemitism. I didn’t assign it because it’s the ‘liberal thing’ to do. I just think it’ll get read, start a stink, make talk.”
Closer, Phil thought. When the opening did come, how would he say it? How had he put it last night? He couldn’t remember. In his mind he rehearsed phrases. “I’m a Jew.” Would that be the natural way? “I’m Jewish.” That was better. “I’m a Jew. I’m Jewish.”
“Got any special slant on it yet?” Tingler asked, turning to him.
“Yeah. But I’m never any good talking about a thing till it’s written.” Tension stood in his words, in spite of his desire to seem matter-of-fact.
“You sound as if you had something pretty hot,” Anne said.
“I feel pretty hot over it,” he said. He glanced at her. Here it was. “And I don’t think the heat has anything to do with my being Jewish.”
“Of course it hasn’t,” she said. “When’ll they run?”
“Oh, Phil’s just started,” Minify put in. “Probably not before summer.” He sounded comfortable. “I’m afraid it’ll be just as timely then.” They all made sounds or gestures of agreement, and the talk went off again to the troublesome next issue.
Phil heard none of it. “It’s done; I’m in,” he told himself. The odd excitement in him when the moment came had been read as high interest in the series itself; that it had to do with anything more personal than that had been apparent to nobody. Of that he was sure. Of course, this was a special crowd; he’d had no hostility to contend with. Nobody had shown surprise; nobody had changed expression; they didn’t give a damn. But it was the first hurdle, anyway, a line of demarcation crossed. He’d said it and he was launched. Like a debutante, he thought, and smiled to himself.
He wasn’t due for another half-hour, but Kathy was dressed and ready. She went to the piano, played a few measures, and then stood up. From the small kitchen where Claudia was getting dinner came the teasing smell of roasting beef. He didn’t know yet that they would have dinner there. He would be pleased.
The room was too warm. She crossed to the window and threw it wide open. At once snow began to sift over the sill. It had been snowing all day, and the radio said there’d be twelve inches before morning. It felt right to have it snow a week before Christmas. Everything felt right these days.
Last night she’d come home from Phil’s and gone straight to bed. She’d propped both pillows behind her as if she were going to read, but she’d never opened a book. She’d lain there, smoking and thinking until past two, just letting the minutes stream by. If ever there was a time, she’d thought lazily, almost cozily, when you’re glad you’re a woman, it’s this first moment of knowing that a man you’re drawn to is falling in love with you. That’s when you’re completely, un-complicatedly glad you are. None of the vague resentment that “it’s a man’s world” held its shape against the good solvent of that first knowing. Suddenly it was an unarguable blessed thing to be a woman, and you felt a kind of indebtedness to the man who made you feel so.
All day she’d felt that, and now, waiting for him to get there, she still did. He’d talked of marriage, obliquely, squeezing the words out. She wanted to marry again. She’d never be fully happy without it.
Perhaps “being conventional” had something to do with it. Once Uncle John had teased her because she’d said she'd never go to a theater alone at night— the vision of herself alone in the lobby for a smoke during intermission made her squirm.
“Give up smoking,” he’d said, and then, “Vassar and Bill between them didn’t have any luck making you conservative, Kathy; they did better about making you conventional.”
“Because I won’t behave just like a man?” She’d felt resentful. “A man can drop into a bar alone and have a drink and get talking to somebody and go have dinner with him—you think I’m conventional because I can’t?”
“Don’t get so emphatic. I didn’t mean much.”
But he’d been partly right. She just didn’t feel right on her own, and maybe that was being conventional about “the things a woman can’t do.” It was trivial, probably a throwback to the nagging envy in childhood about being a boy instead of “just a girl.” Trivial or no, it was there.
She wound her watch. It was seven. She was waiting dinner for a man again and found it sweet to be doing it, and if that made her a conventional fool, why, let it. The bell rang.
He was taking off galoshes in the outside hall, and she waited till he straightened up. When he came in, she put her hand out, and he took it in both of his and then released it quickly. “You’re on the dot again,” she said.
“Should I be fashionably late?” He laughed as he shook snow off his coat. “The other time you said that and I said that and then I was afraid you’d think I was coy or always mugging or something.” His voice was easier than she’d ever heard it, his manner surer. She watched him fold his coat and put it on a chair, his hat on top of it. He sniffed at the homely smell of cooking and looked about him. She saw him catch sight of the table, laid and waiting in one corner of the living room. His whole mood seemed suddenly to sparkle.
“You don’t mean here?” When she nodded, he made a sound of surprise and pleasure.
“So we can talk.” She was delighted she’d thought of it. She motioned him to the sofa and went to the bar table. “This time I’m not going to let you get going on anything else. I’ve tried all day to guess what it could be.”
“Have you really?”
“I kept thinking, suppose I were him, and had to find an idea for this, what would I do?” She came back with two Martinis, walking gingerly because she’d poured them too full.
He waited, unwilling to say anything. He wanted her to go on, to offer even more testimony that his problems mattered to her. He took the glass and leaned forward to sip it before he brought it closer. She sat on the sofa beside him, in her eyes an eagerness that was all the testimony anybody could want.
“And what would you do?”
She wrinkled her nose and shook her head. “I’m just no good at ideas. The ones you told me seemed swell, but you threw them out and kept on hunting.”
“You’ll see why now.” He hitched himself around. He wanted to see her face change as Minify’s had. For another moment he said nothing. “I’m going to tell everybody I’m Jewish, that’s all.”
“Jewish? But you’re not, Phil, are you?” Instantly she added, “It wouldn’t make any difference, of course.”
But something had appeared in her eyes.
“You said, ‘I’m going to tell’—as if you hadn’t before but would now,” she went on, “so I just wondered. Not that it’d matter to me, one way or the other.”
“You said that before.” He put his drink down.
“Well, are you, Phil?”
He almost said, “You know I’m not,” but it choked back. Some veil of a thing had shown in her eyes. He’d been watching her face every minute, greedy for the quick approval that would show there. This had been quick, but different. She wanted him not to be Jewish. She knew he was not, knew that if he were, he’d never have concealed it. But she wanted to hear him say so right out.
“Oh, this is nonsense,” she said briskly. “I know perfectly well you’re not Jewish and I wouldn’t care if you were. It’s just interesting.”
He reached for a cigarette. Of course she wouldn’t care, any more than he would. Or would she? If he said now, “I really am Jewish”? He’d be the same guy, the same face, the same voice, manner, tweed suit, same eyes, nose, body, but the word “Jewish” would have been said and he’d be different in her mind. In that very same vessel that contained him there’d be a something to “not-care” about.
“Why, Phil,” she said slowly, “you’re annoyed.” She put her drink down also. “You haven’t said anything.”
“I’m not annoyed. I’m just thinking.”
“Don’t be so serious about it—you must know where I stand.”
“I do, Kathy.”
“It’s just that it caught me off balance. You know, not knowing much about you because you kept making me talk about my childhood. So for a second there—” She laughed and shook her head. “Not very bright on the uptake.”
He smiled. He felt heavy, flattened out. With her last sentence, the creamy smooth tone had come back. The laugh was the laugh he’d heard that first night. His hand, listless on the arm of the sofa, dropped over the side. Without knowing that he did it, he felt his thumb and forefinger tip together, out of sight, making a circle.
“But anyway, you don’t like my angle,” he said. “Do you?”
“Oh, I do. It’s—” She broke off. Now she reached for a cigarette, and he leaned toward her to light it. Her hair shone. He heard her breathe. Physical knowledge of her moved through him. But there was a sadness to it he couldn’t name.
“It’s what?”
“Oh, Phil, I just think it’ll mix everybody up. People won’t know what you are.”
“After I’m through, they’ll—” He couldn’t say it. A remarkable thing had happened. Something had seized him that he couldn’t argue with. It had started to happen with her first question. Now he knew suddenly what it was. This heavy strange thing in him was what you felt when you’d been insulted. He felt insulted. If he were really a Jew, this is what he’d feel. He was having his first lesson. With Kathy, he’d stumbled into his first lesson at feeling bruised and unwilling to say the placating thing, the reassuring thing. She had reminded him that there was something important about knowing that you were not a Jew or were a Jew, no matter what your face or voice or manners or whole being. A slow soreness had been spreading through him. He’d be damned if he’d let her see it. But at last he knew what it was.
“They’ll know afterwards that you’d just been assuming a pose?” she finished for him. “Of course they will. And even so, it’ll keep cropping up.”
“All right. Let it.”
His words were calm. No, they were calmly spoken, but the answer was brusque. That much he could not help. Kathy? The Kathy who’d thought up the whole series? She wanted to fight the thing, sure. She wanted Smith’s to use its three-million circulation to yell and scream and take sides and fight. That’s the way she’d put it that night. But she didn’t like the idea of anybody misunderstanding anything about him.
He saw a perplexity begin in her face. She was frowning. She was thinking, away somewhere from where they were, thinking to herself. Then the moment was over. She made a quick scissoring with both her hands, slashing the last few minutes out of time.
“I’m out of my head,” she said firmly. “‘Let it’ is right. Who cares? I was just being too practical about things.” She smiled directly at him. “It’s a grand idea. Only, last night you said there’d be pitfalls, and I guess I got looking for those right off.”
His spirits rose. This quick change bewildered him, but he felt relieved, at least enough to get by on for now. The mind plays funny tricks—look at his own “slow take” on Belle’s Jew-us-down. He told Kathy about it, and she said, “Those nasty propaganda phrases.” Again he was reassured. He had been a fool to toss his scheme at her without any windup. You could do things like that with an editor, but with her he’d have done better to explain first, lead her along to make her see the inevitability of it.
“There’ll be nasty things,” he said. “But after all, the whole point is to find out for myself.”
“How long will it take, do you think?” He shrugged, and her shoulders imitated his, as if to agree that nobody could ever predict how long anything important would take.
“You and the Minifys will have to promise not to give away my act,” he said. She nodded, and he said, “But really. No exceptions for anything. O.K.?”
“O.K.” She made a child’s cross-my-heart. “What about the people at Smith’s? Won’t they talk?”
“At—but they’re not in on it. Only John.”
“They think you’re Jewish?” She sounded unbelieving.
“I don’t think you understand, Kathy. If this is going to work—maybe it won’t—but the only chance is to go whole hog at it.” Carefully he explained about having met none of the staff until today, knowing nobody in the East; he gave a brief account of the luncheon and the start he’d made. “It’s got to run right through everything,” he ended.
“Why, of course. I hadn’t really seen it before.”
She seemed penitent, and guilt rose obscurely in him. He demanded too much always. He judged too quickly. “I got riled at you before,” he said. “I thought for a minute that if I were Jewish—” At her quick laugh he broke off. He felt a fool.
“Now, Phil, you’re not calling me An Anti Semite?” She made three round words of it.
“Good Lord, no.”
There was a pause. They each leaned forward to pick up their neglected glasses. The silence expanded. It’s no good analyzing every reaction, he thought. Was his feeling a fool the right reaction? Or his being riled? Save it, quit it, he ordered himself. Dope it later, when you can think.
“My trouble is,” he said to her, “I’m always too damn apt to weigh and measure and wonder and ponder everything till I don’t know where I stand.”
“I’m not,” she said. Her voice was soft. “Not often. But last night I did that, too. I didn’t get to sleep till nearly three.”
“Kathy.”
He wanted to take her into his arms. We’ll work things out, he thought. If there’s anything real to work out, we’ll work it out. Somewhere behind him a swinging door swished.
“Dinner,” she said. “Let’s finish these at the table.”
The soreness of disappointment wouldn’t leave her. The moment the front door had closed on him, she’d wanted to call him back, find the one more thing to say that would change the feel of the evening.
It wasn’t even eleven. She went about the living room, emptying ash trays, tidying up the bar table. Claudia had missed his dinner napkin; it was still on the end table where he’d carried it with him when they’d gone over to the sofa for coffee. She took up the yellow square. “KLP,” the monogram said fatly. She tossed it on the coffee tray and carried both into the small kitchen. Claudia was always in such a rush to escape, it had become an unwritten agreement between them that she need not bother with the belated coffee things. Kathy washed the small cups and the slivers of spoons. “KLP” twined on their fiddle-shaped handles. All fancy and twisted, she thought.
She dried the things and put them away. The soreness persisted. The evening had balled up. She’d balled it up by that extraordinary reluctance she’d felt about his idea. Remembering that first instant after his announcement, she felt fidgety. What had happened to her? She didn’t like it.
“It’s a brilliant notion, Phil. It’ll make a stunning series. You’ll be famous.” Twice she’d said that, once during dinner and once later on. He’d smiled each time, and each time she’d thought that the snarl was straightening out. But the next moment he’d talked about something else, and the discomfort remained in her.
What had hit her? From where had it come?
She sighed. The subterranean paths that twined through human impulses and motives always eluded you if you tried to follow them. At least for her they did. There was no use to will herself to the task. She never had a road map. She always got lost.
It really was a good idea; she knew it in the same blind way she knew when a play had a good plot, or a novel a strong sense of character and movement. She should have said so at once, kept to herself the instant visions of the difficulties he’d get into, praised him wholly. That’s what a man needed from a woman. Belief, encouragement, never skepticism, no matter how truly skepticism might be justified. She’d failed him by reacting too quickly.
That’s all it was.
Bill wouldn’t have minded; he wouldn’t even have noticed anything that subtle. Phil was neurotic, she supposed, easily thrown off key, easily let down. But the Bills weren’t for her, and Phil was. She needed to learn him a little more to know where lay the craters and bogs of his intricate personality and be quicker about stepping around them. It was so easy to hurt a man like Phil. Yet the sensitive mind was his appeal, and the delight she felt when his eyes went easy and happy was her reward.
She wished he’d not had to leave just then. The accommodator she’d sent him, Emma, was the timetable kind who would march off at eleven, heart patient or no, so he had no choice. But perhaps another hour would have sloughed off their heaviness. He hadn’t even tried to kiss her the whole stilted evening. And the quiet look had been on him.
Disconsolate, she turned out the lights and went into her room. As she undressed, dissatisfaction wormed anew through her.
“I’m getting neurotic myself.” She’d blundered with him over his idea, so what? She’d said the wrong things, so what? He knew a moment later she was sorry—she’d said perfectly openly she’d been off her head. You blunder, you apologize—that ought to be all there was to it. Instead that good feeling that everything was right had burst like a bubble blown against slate.