This time Alan would not have the power to exorcise her mood. Nor could she tell him about the event which most tormented her: the man she had first seen some months ago from the window of her hotel room, standing under her very window reading a newspaper, as if waiting for her to come out. Once more she had seen him on her way to visit Philip. She had encountered him in the subway station, and he had let several subway cars pass by in order to take the one she was taking.

It was not a flirtation. He made no effort to speak to her. He seemed engaged in an impersonal observation of her. In Mambo's Night Club he had sat a few tables away and he was writing in a notebook.

This was the way criminals were shadowed, just before being caught. Was he a detective? What did he suspect her of? Would he report to Alan? Or to her parents? Or would he take his notes downtown to all the awesome buildings in which they carried on investigations of one kind or another, and would she receive one day a notice asking her to leave the United States and return to her place of birth, Hungary, because the life of Ninon de l'Enclos, or Madame Bovary was not permitted by the law?

If she told Alan that she had been followed by a man, Alan would smile and say: "Why, of course, this isn't the first time, is it? That's the penalty you pay for being a beautiful woman. You wouldn't want it not to happen, would you?"

For the first time, on this bleak early morning walk through New York streets not yet cleaned of the night people's cigarette butts and empty liquor bottles, she understood Duchamp's painting of a "Nude Descending a Staircase." Eight or ten outlines of the same woman, like many multiple exposures of a woman's personality, neatly divided into many layers, walking down the stairs in unison.