Her eyelids seemed to thicken. She had never revealed so much about him. ‘I kissed him good-bye one morning and he never come back.’

She seemed ready to talk it out about this person.

‘Do you still … I suppose you still care for him,’ Newman ventured.

‘Me?’ She laughed scoffingly. ‘I’m a very hard woman these days, Signer.’ It was a curious sentence she repeated now and then. ‘I keep wondering about you. Weren’t you really ever married?’

‘Oh no. I’ve always been an old batch,’ he smiled.

‘How do you keep looking so neat?’

‘Oh, I’m careful, that’s all.’

‘You are,’ she said, inspecting him with some wonder, ‘you’re a careful type of man.’

‘I have my moments,’ he said uneasily. He realized that for the first time they were really talking about each other.

They had reached the park and they sat on a bench from which they could watch the big hotels facing Park Plaza. A line of horse-drawn carriages stood at the curb near them, beside each carriage an old driver with a silk hat. Behind them a marble fountain bubbled and a boy sat on its rim with his feet in the water.

She never let go of his arm, even as they sat. They were silent for a while, watching limousines pull up to the glittering doorways of the elegant hotels.

Softly she said,’ What kind of car do you have?’

‘Plymouth.’

‘What kind? I mean the body.’

‘Oh. A sedan,’ he said, as a gray roadster passed.

‘Uh huh.’

She stared at the traffic again. ‘What do you do for excitement usually?’

‘Not much. Been pretty busy all my life, just working.’

‘Some have it all and some got nothing.’ Her sudden philosophical moments pleased him. She seemed poetic at times.

‘That’s the truth, I guess. Although I’ve had my share of things,’ he sighed.

‘Yeh? Like what?’ she asked idly.

‘Oh, a nice home, and … well, a good job.’

‘But didn’t you ever have a good time?’

‘Well, sure, I …’ He started to say that he used to bowl with Fred and had great times taking drives in his car. He turned to her. ‘I guess I’ve never had what you mean,’ he said.

‘That’s the trouble with you, Lawrence.’

He felt he was shrinking and there was nothing for him to say except something foolish. ‘I’ve been what they call repressed, Gertrude.’

‘That’s why I always picked actors.’ He did not know quite what she meant by picked, but he shed it from his mind. ‘Actors got style sometimes. They make a dollar and spend seventy-five cents. Everybody else is saving to pay insurance.’

She seemed to be telling him that she knew how hard he had found it to pay the two dollars and forty cents for their seats at Radio City two nights before.

‘Well, actors make a lot more money than …’

‘No they don’t. You’d be surprised.’

‘Would you like to go to a night club sometime?’ he asked.