The essence was construction. In a large way she could adopt this because it harmonized with her obsessional battle against destruction and negativism.

She was not alone against the demoralizing, dissolving influence of Zora.

Perhaps the trap was opening a little, in an unforeseen direction.

What he could not do for her (because she was his pleasure, his self-indulgence, his sensually fulfilling mistress, and this gave him guilt), he might do for the party and for a large, anonymous mass of people.

The trap was the fixation on the impossible. A change in Zora, instead of an aggravation. A change in Rango, instead of a gradual strangulation.

Passion alone had not made him whole. But it had made him whole enough to be useful to the world.

When the barge failed to become the meeting place for Rango's fellow workers, it was suddenly transformed into its opposite: a shelter for the dreamers looking for a haven. The more bitter the atmosphere of Paris, the more intense the dissensions, the rising tide of political antagonisms, dangers, fears, the more they came to the barge as if it were Noah's Ark against a new deluge.

It was no longer the secret boat of a voyage of two. The unicellular nights had come to an end. Rango was but a visitor-lover in transit.

The divergence between them became sharply exteriorized: while Rango attended meetings, talked feverishly in cafés, sought to convert, to teach, to organize, worked among the poor he had known, among the artists, Djuna's friends brought to the barge the values they believed in danger of being lost, a passionate clinging to aesthetic and human creation.

Rango brought stories of cruelty and personal sacrifice: Ramon had been four years without seeing his wife and child. He had been working in Guatemala. Now his wife in Paris was gravely ill, and he wanted to throw off his duties there and come, at any cost. "Think of a man forgetting his loyalty to his party, just because his wife and child need him. Willing to sacrifice the good of millions, perhaps, for just two."

"Rango, that's just what you would do, and you know it. That's what you have done with Zora. You've given twenty years of your strength to one human being, when you could have done greater things, too..."