When you lose your wings, and wear a dark suit bought in the cheapest store of Paris, to become anonymous, when you discard your earrings, and the polish on your nails, hoping to express an abdication of the self, a devotion to impersonal service, and still you do not feel sincere, you feel like an actress, because you expect conversion to come like a miracle, by the grace of love for one party member...

They know I am pretending.

That is how she interpreted the silence.

In her own eyes, she stood judged and condemned. She was the only woman there, and they knew she was there only because she was a woman, tangled in her love, not in the revolution.

Then Rango came, breathless, and anxious: "There will be no meeting. You are ordered to disperse. No explanations."

They were relieved to go. They left in silence. They did not look at her.

Rango and Djuna were left alone.

Rango said: "Your friend the policeman was on guard at the top of the stairs. A hobo had been found murdered. So when the Guatemalans began to arrive, he asked for papers. It was dangerous." He had made his first error, in thinking the barge a good place. The head of the group had been severe. Had called him a romantic... "He also knows about you. Asked if you were a member. I had to tell the truth."

"Should I sign the papers?" she asked, with a docility which was so much like a child's that Rango was moved.

"If you do it for me, that's bad. You have to do it for yourself."

"Oh, for myself. You know what I believe. The world today is rootless; it's like a forest with all the trees with their heads in the ground and their roots gesticulating wildly in the air, withering. The only remedy is to begin a world of two; in two there is hope of perfection, and that in turn may spread to all... But it must begin at the base, in relationship of man and woman."

"I'm going to give you books to read, to study."

Would his new philosophy change his overindulgence and slavishness to Zora, would he see her with new eyes, see the waste, the criminality of her self-absorption? Would he say to her, too: there are more important things in the world than your little pains. One must forget one's personal life. Would his personal life be altered as she had not been able to alter it? Would his confusions and errors be clarified?

Djuna began to hope. She began to study. She noted analogies between the new philosophy and what she had been expounding uselessly to Rango.

For instance, to die romantically, recklessly, unintelligently, was not approved by the party. Waste. Confusion. Indiscipline. The party developed a kind of stoicism, an armature, a form of behavior and thinking.

Djuna gradually allied herself to the essence of the philosophy, to its results rather, and overlooked the rigid dogmas.