342
PARTISAN REVIEW
She herself had little to say, and sat passive, letting the torrent of
talk and endearment splash over her. Sooner or later, she knew, the law
of diminishing retutns would begin to operate, and she would cease to
reap these overwhelming profits from the small investment of herself she
had made. At the moment, he was begging her to marry him, describing
a business conference he was about to attend, and asking her approval of
a vacation trip he was planning to take with his wife. Of these three
elements in his conversation, the first was predominant, but she sensed
that already she was changing for him, becoming less of a mistress and
more of a confidante. It was significant that he was not {as she had feared)
hoping to ride all the way to New York with her: the business conference,
he explained, prevented that.
It never failed, she thought, to be a tiny blow to guess that a man is
losing interest in you, and she was tempted, as on such occasions she
always had been, to make some gesture that would quicken
it
again.
If
she let him _think she would sleep with him, he would stay on the train,
and let the conference go by the board. He had weighed the conference,
obviously, against a platonic interlude, and made the sensisble decision.
But she stifled her vanity, and said to herself that she was glad that he
was showing some signs of self-respect; in the queer, business-English
letters he had written her, and on the phone for an hour at a time at her
father's house, he had been too shockingly abject.
She let him get off the train, still talking happily, pressed his hand
warmly but did not kiss him.
It was three weeks before he came to see her in her New York apart·
ment, and then, she could tell, he was convalescent. He had become more
critical of her and more self-assured. Her one-and-a-half rooms
in
Greenwich Village gave him claustrophobia, he declared, and when she
pointed out to him that the apartment was charming, he stated flatly that
it was not the kind of place he liked, nor the kind of place she ought to
be living in. He was more the business man and less the suitor, and
though he continued to ask her to marry him, she felt that the request was
somewhat formal; it was only when he tried to make love to her that his
real, hopeless, humble ardor showed itself once more. She fought him off,
though she had an inclination to yield, if only to reestablish her ascend·
ancy over him. They went to the theater two nights, and danced, and
drank champagne, and the third morning he phoned her from his hotel
that he had a stomach attack and would have to go home to Cleveland
with a doctor.
More than a month went by before she saw him again. This time he
refused to come to her apartment, but insisted that she meet him at
his
suite in the Ambassador. They passed a moderate evening: the man con·
tented himself with dining at Longchamps. He bought her a large Brie
cheese at the Voisin down the street, and told her an anti-New-Deal joke.
Just below the surface of his genial manner, there was an hostility that
hurt her. She found that she was extending herself to please him.
All
