As he told this story it was clear to Lillian that he still felt the shock of the deception and had never forgiven his father. The intensity of the wish had been made even greater by the poverty of his childhood which made the visit to the battleship a unique pleasure discussed by his playmates for a whole year and not easily forgotten.

"One very cold, snowy night my mother and I were walking towards the river. I was very small, five years old maybe. My mother was walking too fast for me, and I felt terribly cold, especially my hands. My mother carried a muff. Every now and then she took her right hand out of the muff to grab mine when we crossed the streets. The warmth of her hand warmed me all through. Then she would drop my hand again and nestle hers back in her muff. I began to weep: I wanted to put my hand inside of her muff but she wouldn't let me. I wept and raged as if it were a matter of life and death—probably was, for me. I wanted the warmth and her naked hands. The more I wept and pulled at the muff the harsher my mother got. Finally she slapped my hand so I would let the muff go."

As he told this his blue eyes became the eyes of an irrevocably angry child. Lillian could see clear through his open eyes as through the wrong end of a telescope, a diminutive Jay raging, cold and thwarted, with his blue frozen hands reaching for his mother's muff.

This image was not being transmitted to Lillian the woman, but to the responsive child in herself understanding and sharing his anger and disillusion. It was the child in herself who received it as it sank through and beyond the outer layer of the woman who sat there listening with a woman's full body, a woman's face. But of this response there was no outer sign showing for Jay to see: the child in her lay so deeply locked within her, so deeply buried, that no sign of its existence or of its response was apparent. It did not beckon through her eyes which showed only a woman's compassion, nor alter her gestures nor the pose of her body which was the pose of a woman listening to a child and looking at his smallness without herself changing stature. At this moment, like Jay, she could have slipped out of her maturity, of her woman's body, and exposed her child's face, eyes, movements, and then Jay would have seen it, known that he had communicated with it, touched it by way of his own childhood, and the child might have met the child and become aware of its similar needs.

By her attitude she did not become one with him in this return to his past self. What she overtly extended to him was one who seemed done with her child self and who would replace the harsh mother, extend the muff and the warm naked hands.