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PARTISAN REVIEW
was exactly as if they were drinking in a show window, for nobody
went by who did not peer in, and she felt that she could discern
envy, admiration, and censure in the quick looks that were shot at
her. The man sat at ease, unconscious of these attentions, but she
kept her back straight, her shoulders high with decorum, and let
her bare arms rise and fall now and then in short parabolas of
gesture.
But if for the people outside she was playing the great lady,
for the man across the table she was the Bohemian Girl. It was
plain that she was a revelation to him, that he had never under the
sun seen anyone like her. And he was quizzing her about her way
of life with the intense, unashamed, wondering curiosity of a
provincial seeing for the first time the sights of a great but slightly
decadent city. Answering his questions she was able to see herself
through his eyes (brown .eyes, which were his only good feature,
but which somehow matched his voice and thus enhanced the effect,
already striking, of his having been put together by a good tailor).
What she got from his view of her was a feeling of uniqueness and
identity, a feeling she had once had when, at twenty, she had come
to New York and had her first article accepted by a liberal weekly,
but which had slowly been rubbed away by four years of being on
the inside of the world that had looked magic from Portland,
Oregon. Gradually, now, she was becoming very happy, for she
knew for sure in this compartment that she was beautiful and gay
and clever, and worldly and innocent, serious and frivolous,
capricious and trustworthy, witty and sad, bad and really good, all
mixed up together, all at the same time. She could feel the power
running in her, like a medium on a particularly good night.
As these multiple personalities bloomed on the single stalk
of her ego, a great glow of charity, like the flush of life, suffused
her. This man, too, must be admitted into the mystery; this
stranger must be made to open and disclose himself like a Japanese
water flower. With a messianic earnestness she began to ask him
questions, and though at first his answers displayed a sort of mulish
shyness ("I'm just a traveling salesman," "I'm a suburban busi–
ness man," "I'm an economic royalist"), she knew that sooner or
later he would tell her the truth, the rock-bottom truth, and was
patient with him. It was not the first time she had "drawn a man
out"--the phrase puckered her mouth, for it had never seemed
