THE MAN IN THE BROOKS SHIRT
335
saying, "Do you want anything more? I'll leave the towels here," and the
door swung behind her, leaving the girl alone.
She lay in the bath a long time, gathering her forces. In the tepid
water, she felt for the first time a genuine socialist ardor. For the first
time in her life, she truly hated luxury, hated Brooks Brothers and Berg–
dorf Goodman and Chane! and furs and good food. All the pretty things
she had seen in shops and coveted appeared to her suddenly gross, super–
fatted, fleshly, even, strangely, unclean. By a queer reversal, the very
safety pin in her underwear, which she had blushed for earlier in the
morning came to look to her now as a kind of symbol of moral fastidious–
ness, just as the sores of a mendicant saint can,
if
thought of in the right
way, testify to his spiritual health. A proud, bitter smile formed on her
lips, as she saw herself as a citadel of socialist virginity, that could be
taken and taken again, but never truly subdued. The man's whole assault
on her now seemed to have had a political character; it was an incidental
atrocity in the long class war. She smiled again, thinking that she had
come out of it untouched, while he had been reduced to a jelly.
All morning in the compartment he had been in a state of wild and
happy excitement, full of projects for reform and renewal. He was not
sure what ought to happen next; he only knew that everything must be
different. In one breath, he would have the two of them playing golf
together at Del Monte; in the next, he would imagine that he had given
her up and was starting in again with Leonie on a new basis. Then he
would see himself throwing everything overboard and going to live in sin
in a villa in a little French town. But at that moment a wonderful techni–
cal innovation for the manufacture of steel would occur to him, and he
would be anxious to get back to the office to put it through. He talked of
giving his fortune to a pacifist organization in Washington, and five min–
utes later made up his mind to send little Frank, who showed signs of
being a problem child, to a damn good military school. Perhaps he would
enlarge his Gates Mills house; perhaps he would sell it and move to New
York. He would take her to the theatre and the best restaurants; they
would go· to museums and ride on bus-tops. He would become a CIO
organizer, or else he would give her a job in the personnel department of
the steel company, and she could live in Cleveland with him and Leonie.
But no, he would not do that, he would marry her, as he had said in the
first place, or,
if
she would not marry him, he would keep her in an apart–
ment in New York. Whatever happened she must not get off the train. He
had come to regard her as a sort of rabbit's foot that he must keep by him
at any price.
Naturally, she told herself, the idea was absurd. Yet suddenly her
heart seemed to contract and the mood of indulgent pity ebbed away from
her. She shivered and pulled herself out of the tub. His obstinacy on this
point frightened her.
If
he should bar her way when the time came ... ?
If
there should be a struggle . . . ?
If
she should have to pull the com–
munication cord ... ? She told herself that such things do not happen,
