“And be sure to give Nettie dinner somewhere, or she won’t eat anything.”

She speaks, Nettie thought, as though I were not here.

“I generally do,” Clem said. “We have dinner and then I take her home.”

We have dinner, Nettie repeated to herself, and then he takes me home. Every Sunday evening of this spring and summer. Occasionally they went to Nettie’s small, cluttered apartment, but more often to Clem’s large and empty one. Saturday’s unopened mail and newspapers lay on a little table outside the front door of the apartment, and, inside, the hallway echoed as it would not have done in winter, and smelled of floor polish. Most of the windows were closed and all the blinds were drawn. There were so many doors that two people must feel slightly unsafe until they had entered one room, closed one door behind them.

“That’s all right then,” May said. She yawned, but resumed her sewing. “Nettie,” she began again, “why don’t you bring a friend next weekend? Someone your own age. Some nice young man.”

“Thank you, no,” replied Nettie, turning a page at last.

“You must know some.”

“Well, they are stupid.”

“If you are so critical,” May observed comfortably, “no one will ever love you.”

“And if you’re so tired,” said Clem, conveying disbelief, “why do you go on sewing?”

“Darling, it has to be done, and I’d rather get on with it. I don’t darn your socks for amusement, after all.”

I would love to darn his socks, Nettie thought. She could not tell whether this marriage was worse than other people’s, although it would have gratified her to think it was. Why do men ever marry, she wondered. I can understand that women must have something of the sort—it is our nature, she thought vaguely—but why men? (She had forgotten about the socks.) Because nothing better has been worked out? But they don’t even expect anything better; the limitations are flagrantly justified, like restrictions in a war, in the interests of national security. She told herself reprovingly, It is an institution—but this produced a mental picture of a large brick building not unlike a nineteenth-century prison. If he and I had been married, she wondered, would it have had to deteriorate into this? May and Sarah discussed their husbands as though they were precocious children—“Clem is very handy in the house,” as one might say “He hardly ever cries” or “He sleeps right through the night.” Let me go on believing, she asked, looking at his canvas shoe, that love isn’t merely getting along with someone. She thought that once she accepted such a compromised version of love she would never reach back again to this. (She had excessive confidence in the instructive power of experience.)

Clem’s foot moved. Nettie looked up. “Here’s Matt,” she said.