He set the ash tray in her lap and got up. ‘Now let’s not … let’s not rush things,’ he said, turning toward the windows at the front of the room.

‘I know what I’m talking about. You don’t know what they can do. Lully, look at me!’

At the window he turned around.

‘Before the war they caught some of them with rifles and bombs, did you know that? Fred’s got rifles, hasn’t he?’

‘He’s a hunter, he uses them for hunting.’

‘When are you going to wake up? He’s got two revolvers, hasn’t he ? Who hunts with revolvers?’

‘He just goes in for target practice sometimes.’

‘Not sometimes, all the time. I wouldn’t be surprised if they all get together up in Jersey and practice.’

‘But he brought home foxes. He hunts, dear, he hunts.’

‘I’m telling you what I know, Lully, and you’re going to listen to me!’ She got up quickly. ‘You’re not going to be able to argue with them once they make up their mind they don’t like you. If any one of those stew brains that hang around them gets the idea we’re a couple of Hebes …’

‘Well, in California they didn’t think that of you, did they?’

‘No, because I was in at the beginning. I talked up about the Jews. Not like you. You never say anything.’

‘What is there to say? You want me to go out and make speeches?’

‘You don’t have to go out and make speeches. But take yesterday, for instance. You should’ve told that hotel man what you think. You should’ve spoke up instead of standing there like that. I was never so humiliated in my life. That’s probably why Fred got sick of you. You never say anything. I notice it myself.’

‘Well I used to, but I …’ He broke off, perplexed, and looked down at the rug. ‘I don’t know what’s happening to me.’

‘Why, what’s happening to you?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said honestly. Then he went to the chair at the vanity table and sat, his face worried and reddened. ‘I just can’t seem to bring myself to say anything about them any more. I feel it. Sometimes I feel like I could almost murder them. But I can’t seem to say it any more.’

Quietly, mystified, she went closer to him, and looking down at him, asked, ‘Why?’

Seeking his reply he sat motionless and silent. What had seemed like one thing had turned into another. He had gone along all his life bearing this revulsion toward the Jews and it had never been anything of importance to him. It was much the same as a dislike for certain kinds of food. And then he had come to see how many others shared his feeling, and he had found stimulation around the subway pillars and all the time he had felt no great personal fear about what was looming up ahead. In those earlier impressions of the violence to come, the attackers were … well, if not gentlemen, certainly amenable to the guidance of gentlemen much like himself. They would clean up the city overnight, as it were, and then the city would belong exclusively to people like himself, and the riffraff who had accomplished the change would somehow disappear into the anonymity from which they had sprung. But hearing her tell it, they were not anonymous people to begin with and they could hardly be expected to disappear just when they had succeeded in taking the city.