‘If they give me my old room it’ll be great for us.’

‘Off by itself?’ she asked.

‘That’s what I mean.’

There were moments when he dared say these things and hold her thigh in broad daylight. As in the nights – he had come to live only for the nights – he felt willing to die for her at these times. Now he glanced at the sun and gauged its distance to the horizon.

‘Tonight we go out in the woods,’ she said, ‘all right? I love the woods.’

‘We can go near the lake,’ he said, remembering a certain spot he had picked out for a girl who had never arrived. Now the girl would come, she was his wife, she could not run away or be coy and make things difficult for him, and it was all respectable and honorable and still there was this incredible sting in it that he hoped would never go away.

They drove, and he thought of the garbage can and swore with the passion of a knight’s resolve that she must never know of it and be made unhappy. He returned his hand to the wheel.

‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had a place of our own in the country?’ she mused carefully.

‘The kind you’d like would have to have forty-six rooms.’

‘Well there’s nothing wrong with having expensive tastes. You know what you never did?’ she said in that same half-relaxed tone.

‘What did I never did?’ he said.

‘You never had a talk with Mac.’

‘Now look,’ he said conclusively.‘ Mac is a man who drinks a great deal and has a number of very good business ideas. And none of them takes less than a million dollars to put into operation.’

‘Then you talked to him?’ she asked with a quick sharpening of interest.

‘I always talk to him.’

‘I mean about maybe getting together with him.’

‘Even if I had anything to offer him I wouldn’t. He’s a terrible drunk, dear. You know that.’

‘That’s true,’ she said, thinking.

‘Let’s try to get along with what we have.’

‘Yeh, but don’ t you want me to make a home for you?’

This, he understood, was another way of asking when she could quit her job. It distressed him. She seemed more beautiful every day and he could not understand why she had given herself to him so freely and after such a short courtship.

‘I told you dear,’ he said kindly, ‘you can quit any time you feel like.’

‘But I can’t on the money you’re making now. I really can’t understand you.’

‘I’ve got two thousand dollars, Gert, Now what kind of a business can you open with two thousand dollars?’

‘Well, think about it. Let’s think,’ she asked as a minimum.

She turned and looked out her window, reflectively. After he had carefully negotiated a sharp turn and was settling back for a straight run, he glanced at her. Where was her mind now? Like last Sunday when they were driving around Sheepshead Bay to watch the boats. In the midst of a simple conversation she had suddenly announced that she was not from Rochester, had never even been in Rochester. She had been born and brought up on Staten Island. The Rochester disguise was for the benefit of employers who might take her for a Jewess if they knew she was a New Yorker. Which was all right. He could understand it. But riding with her now he felt as he always did when she fell into a prolonged silence; a dread came over him that she was thinking about places and people, and things she had done of which she had never told him. Again he took his eyes from the road and glanced at her. She was smoking now, slowly drawing on the cigarette, her eyes narrowed thoughtfully. She shifted and he noticed the full curve of her hip.