The loud ringing continued. One of the policemen picked up the telephone and to a question put to him he answered: "No, not at all, not at all. Don't worry. Everything is absolutely calm. A very calm night."

Lillian and Jay had sat on the curb and laughed.

But whatever Jay's secret of freedom was, it could not be imparted to Lillian. She could not gain it by contagion. All she could feel were Jay's secret needs: "Lillian, I need you. Lillian, be my guardian angel. Lillian, I need peace in which to work." Love, faithfulness, attentiveness, devotion, always created the same barriers around Lillian, the same limitations, the same taboos.

Jay avoided the moments of beauty in human beings. He stressed their analogies with animals. He added inert flesh, warts, oil to the hair, claws to the nails. He was suspicious of beauty. It was like a puritan's suspicion of make up, a crowd's suspicion of prestidigitators. He had divorced nature from beauty. Nature was neglect, unbuttoned clothes, uncombed hair, homeliness.

Lillian was bewildered by the enormous discrepancy which existed between Jay's models and what he painted. Together they would walk along the same Seine river, she would see it silky grey, sinuous and glittering, he would draw it opaque with fermented mud, and a shoal of wine bottle corks and weeds caught in the stagnant edges.

He had discovered a woman hobo who slept every night in exactly the same place, in the middle of the sidewalk, in front of the Pantheon. She had found a subway ventilator from which a little heat arose and sometimes a pale grey smoke, so that she seemed to be burning. She lay in a tidy way, her head resting on her market bag packed with her few belongings, her brown dress pulled over her ankles, her shawl neatly tied under her chin. She slept calm and dignified as if she were in her own bed.

Jay had painted her soiled and scratched feet, the corns on her toes, the black nails. But he overlooked the story Lillian loved and remembered of her, that when they tried to remove her to an old woman's home she had refused saying: "I prefer to stay here where all the great men of France are buried. They keep me company. They watch over me."

Lillian was reminded of the Talmudic words: "We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are."

Lillian would become so confused by Jay's chaotic living, his dadaism, his contradictions, that she submitted to Djuna's clarifications. Jay's "realism," his need to expose, debunk, as he said, his need for reality, did not seem as real as Djuna's intuitive interpretations of their acts.