Margot remembered the evening she had first seen Jerry from across a room and how she thought he was very striking. She remembered how he had snubbed her, and the three white girls with him, and how they had smiled at her in amusement, confident that their handsome plaything could not be taken from all three of them by her. She disliked Jerry for allowing them to smile at her that way. Now she wanted to hurt him.

“How was your Anglo-Saxon last night?” she asked.

“Very good.” Jerry’s teeth flashed white again as he smiled.

“Do you think she’ll call you again next weekend, or somebody else?”

“What the hell do you mean? I got her in my bag!”

“And she comes whenever you call?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“She’s in my bag!” Jerry said. He was not smiling. He was getting very irritated.

Margot knew that she was winning. “Next time she calls,” she told Jerry, “before you go running over, ask her to describe your face.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” said Jerry.

But she had gone into the bathroom and locked the door. And Jerry sat on the chair in the living room, thinking, not quite sure whether or not he had been cut. Then he laughed aloud, with an unnatural enthusiasm calculated to carry the sound into the bathroom and above the noise of the running shower. He had decided that the thing was not a cut. The idea of its being so was silly. His girl was the liberated daughter of one of the oldest and wealthiest families in the East, and a sufficient amount of its three generations of money was firmly invested in his car, his clothes and his pockets.

“Silly bitch,” Jerry said aloud. “What a silly bitch this is.”

VII

MARGOT FOUND THAT SHE COULD NOT bring herself to study even a little during the week. She found that she did not want to do anything. She found that she loved to spend the week thinking about the weekends. She liked to lie on her bed during the day and play with ideas, both his and her own, carefully held over and salvaged from the last weekend. She liked to glance up at the framed picture of him on her dresser and discover new ways of seeing his face. She liked to have other girls come in the room and watch them become uneasy when they saw the picture. She especially liked it when they felt they had to say something nice about his looks: the sharpness of his nose and how well it sat on his sensitive face, the thrust and determination and sensitivity of his chin, the warm eyes, the way his mouth was sad but almost smiling. She liked the way they would inevitably ask if they were going to get married, and the way some of the girls made little impromptu social observations, almost in apology, when she said that they were very seriously considering it. And she tried not to see the way some of them would smile, secretly, and look at other girls in a knowing way.