‘Mr Ardell’s gone out. I’m taking over till he gets back. If you want to wait for him you can. Some men don’t like to be interviewed by women,’ she said, official and cold.

He floundered uncertainly among the timbres of her voice. ‘I … it’s all right with me.’ He laughed. Idiotically, he instantly thought.

‘You want to work here?’ she asked flatly.

He nodded. ‘I wondered if there was anything here for me.’

‘What kind of work do you want?’

There was a contralto deadliness in her tone, as though she were about to trap him mercilessly. She never once moved. A woman restraining fury might sit so erectly, with the eyebrow raised and the eyes so fixed. Still, it might be her usual business manner, he thought hopefully.

‘I’d like to use my kind of experience if I can.’

‘You don’t need your experience for this place. They hire anybody in this place. All they do is ask if you’re a citizen. Jews, niggers, wops, anybody.’

Air rushed into his mouth and dissolved his words.

‘You thought I was a Jew,’ she said vengefully.

She was asking him. He nodded infinitesimally, his eyes wide and fixed upon her.

‘So you were cockeyed. You see that now, I guess.’

It was hard for him to grasp. It was dreamlike to him. It was like seeing a face in a movie change and dissolve, taking on a new character and yet remaining the same face. She had not changed since the interview in his office. But her features had a new effect upon him. Her eyes in which he had detected that mocking secretiveness were now simply the darkened eyes of a woman who had done a lot of crying. And yet they were the same eyes. Her nose … it occurred to him that the Irish often had a dip to their noses, and he thought now that it became her well. And yet it was the same nose. Her loud way of talking no longer seemed offensive. He felt rather that it was forthright, and where it had then indicated crudeness now it bespoke a contempt for evasions. As a Jewess she had seemed dressed in cheap taste, too gaudily. But as a gentile he found her merely colorful in the same dress, a woman who expressed her spirited nature in her clothes. It was as though she now had a right to her faults; as though her flair, her style, her abruptness no longer sprang from bad breeding and an ignorant aping of genteel manners, but from a rebellious mind, an angry mind, a mind that dared to override the smaller rules of behavior. As a Jewess she had seemed vitriolic and pushy and he had hated himself even as he was drawn fearfully to her, but now he no longer feared her for now his love could flow unstained by the-guilt of loving what his dignity had always demanded he look down upon. He swallowed as his eyes lowered to the desk top.