“Will you introduce me to him?” the girl had said directly to Eric, indicating with her bold eyes Jerry, his roommate, a very well-built, very handsome and confident mulatto who had, a minute before, been conversing with Eric and who had just turned away to laugh with well-kept white teeth at something funny that someone in a small group next to Eric had said.

“His name is Jerry,” Eric had said.

“Will you introduce me?” she said.

“What’s your name?”

“Margot.”

He had turned to his roommate. “Jerry,” he said. “Jerry, I want you to meet a friend of mine.”

Jerry turned away from the group and looked at Margot. “Hi,” he said.

“Her name is Margot,” said Eric.

“Hi, Margot,” said Jerry. “Glad to know you.” Then, because she did not say anything but only stared at him, making him uncomfortable because he had been laughing with three white girls, Jerry turned away again.

Eric shrugged his shoulders, as if to bear responsibility for and to dismiss the discourtesy.

“It really doesn’t matter anyway,” she said before he could say anything. “He wouldn’t be a nice person to know.”

Hearing this served to reinforce Eric’s initial impression of the girl’s perception, for he suddenly realized that, truthfully, Jerry was not a nice person to know. But he had never let himself admit it to his mind. He got her a drink and they talked and Eric was impressed by her very excellent command of the language. Unlike many of the blacks he knew, she did not slur her words or singsong them, or talk rapidly, or self-consciously give crisp, overdone enunciations to prove her command; she pronounced each word with a cool precision that was natural and unpracticed. She was well read in contemporary literature, and was a science major at an all-girl school which, she said, was very fine and proper but which reeked with decadence. She had a number of good ideas, all her own, so that at no point in the evening was there ever the need to retreat into the inevitable racial or revolutionary dialogue. Eric was a good listener, especially with blacks, and the evening passed without his ever having to interject into the conversation any fuel to keep it going. And then he found himself responding, talking about himself, his school, his family, his Southern mission, and the things that made up his life and the things that really mattered to him. He noticed that the girl had a peculiar method of listening: she never nodded in agreement or shook her head in disagreement, but looked severe, as if she were instantaneously evaluating in her mind all that was being said and placing him in a category. Eric felt uncomfortable, defensive, slightly agitated, and he had a sense of lacking something, for in all his previous dealings with blacks it had always been he who had felt the confidence and who communicated, in silence, the necessary understanding which made the other person feel comfortable. But now the old situation was reversed. He wished that she would smile; he wished that she would not. He did not want her to look that directly into his eyes; and then he did want it. Her expression carried an air of superiority, of absolute belonging, of something nicely like condescension about it; and alternatively, through the first part of the evening, Eric liked her very much and was afraid of her. Perhaps, he thought, it was because she really regarded him as an equal. Perhaps she thought of him as her inferior. This was a new feeling for Eric. And he liked it. Then, after their third drink, and after she had told him some funny things about the housemothers at her school and their monthly uses of Playboy, she smiled and there were two dimples in her face and her chin stood out, and her lips parted and Eric was not afraid any more. And then it came on him that all along she had been very beautiful and had waited, testingly, until now to show it to him.