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on his part discouraged her by making her feel that there was
nothing very good to give. She had, moreover, a suspicion that his
lapses were deliberate, even malicious, that the man knew what she
was about and why she was about it, and had made up his mind to
thwart her. She felt a Take-me-as-l-am, an I'll-drag-you-down-to–
my-level challenge behind his last words. It was like the resistance
of the patient to the psychoanalyst, of the worker to the Marxist:
she was offering to release him from the chains of habit, .and he
'was standing up and clanking those chains comfortably and impu·
dently in her face. On the other hand, she
knew,
just as the analyst
knows, just as the Marxist knows, that somewhere in his character
there was the need of release and the humility that would accept
aid-and there was, furthermore, a kindness and a general coop·
erativeness which would make him pretend to be a little better than
he was, if that would help her to think better of herself.
For the thing was, the man and the little adventure of being
with him had a kind of human appeal that she kept giving in to
against her judgment.
She liked him.
Why, it was impossible to
say. The attraction was not sexual, for, as the whiskey went down
in the bottle, his face took on a more and more porcine look that
became so distasteful to her that she could hardly meet his gaze,
but continued to talk to him with a large, remote stare, as if he
were an audience of several hundred people. Whenever she did
happen to catch his eye, to really look at him, she was as discon–
certed as an actor who sees a human expression answering him
from beyond the footlights. It was not his air of having money,
either, that drew her to him, though that, she thought humorously,
helped, but it hindered too. It was partly the homespun quality
(the use of the word, "visit," for example, as a verb meaning
"talk" took her straight back to her childhood and to her father,
carpet-slippered, in a brown leather chair), and partly of course
his plain delight in her, which had in it more shrewdness than she
had thought at first, for, though her character was new and inex–
plicable to him, in a gross sense he was clearly a connoisseur of
women. But beyond all this, she had glimpsed in him a vein of
sympathy and understanding that made him available to any
human being, just as he was, apparently, available as a reader to
any novelist-and this might proceed, not, as she had assumed
(Continued on page 324)
