She became, at that instant, indelibly fixed in his eyes not as another child with possibly equal needs, but as the stronger one in possession of the power to dispense to all his needs.

From now on was established an inequality in power: he was the cold and hungry one, she the muff and the warm naked hands.

From now on her needs, concealed and buried as mere interferences with the accomplishment of this role, were condemned to permanent muteness. Strong direction was given to her activity as the muff, as the provider of innumerable battleships in compensation for the one he had been cheated of. Giving to him on all levels, from book to blanket to phonograph to fountain pen to food, was always and forever the battleship he had dreamed and not seen. It was the paying off of a debt to the cheated child.

Lillian did not know then that the one who believes he can pay this early debt meets a bottomless well. Because the first denial has set off a fatality of revenge which no amount of giving can placate. Present in every child and criminal is this conviction that no retribution will repair the injury done. The man who was once starved may revenge himself upon the world not by stealing just once, or by stealing only what he needs, but by taking from the world an endless toll in payment of something irreplaceable, which is the lost faith.

This diminutive Jay who appeared in the darkness when he evoked his childhood was also a personage who could come nearer to her own frightened self without hurting her than the assertive, rather ruthless Jay who appeared in the daytime when he resumed his man's life. When he described his smallness and how he could enter saloons to call for his father without having to swing the doors open, it seemed to Lillian that she could encompass this small figure better in the range of her vision than the reckless, amorphous, protean Jay whose personality flowed into so many channels like swift mercury.

When Jay described the vehemence, the wildness, the hunger with which he went out into the streets to play, it seemed to her that he was simultaneously describing and explaining the vehemence, the hunger, the wildness with which he went out at night now and left her alone, so that the present became strangely innocent in her mind.

When he talked about his impulses towards other women he took on the expression not of a man who had enjoyed another woman sensually, but of a gay, irrepressible child whose acts were absolutely uncontrollable; it became no longer infidelity but a childish, desperate eagerness to "go to the street and play."

She saw him in the present as the same child needing to boast of his conquests out of a feeling of helplessness, needing to be admired, to win many friends, and thus she attenuated in herself the anxiety she experienced at his many far-flung departures from her.