She had tried very hard to feel accepted. And although she made great efforts to laugh and mix and dance, she still grew resentful and somewhat introverted because she found that she could not talk to anyone she knew about the things that really mattered to her. She loved to discover new ideas. She loved to think, and she loved to argue. But she did very little of this. In her early teens she began to date Ray, a fellow who loved his motorcycle better than anything else in the world and who had quit school to prove it. She rode through most of Cleveland with him on the cycle, clinging to his back, and her friends saw her and the rugged, green-shirted Ray, and she was sad because she knew they had developed some respect for her only because she was on the cycle, clinging to a boy who would always be intellectually dead. And when she had tried to talk to Ray about ambition and the dividing line, represented by the cycle, between pastime and purpose, he would put her off and begin to polish the chrome on his bike. Once, when she had suggested that he get a steady job so that he could afford a car, he had looked at her from under his helmet, considered tremendously the suggestion, and said at last: “You know, you right, baby! You stick with me and I bet you can learn me a lot.” Then she had known that it would not work and she had stopped seeing him. Afterwards, she was hurt when she saw other girls in her place on the cycle, clinging to Ray’s green back, and when she realized that it was not the chrome cycle or Ray’s reputation as a mover or the new girl’s attractiveness to Ray that had put her there; it was Margot’s own property value that had caused it, the secret, never admitted reverence and respect which the other girls had for her intelligence and her ability to choose a man of distinction. She was aware that she had made Ray’s reputation for him merely by allowing her body and mind, and all they secretly represented to the others, to pause in idle proximity to his own native dullness as a kind of foil. And at first she thought it kind of funny, a sort of happy-sad commentary on the crass stupidity of people; but later, when she had to date boys who had no cars or cycles or even dimes for the buses, she did not think it so funny. She began to think harder about learning the dance.