“No. But he will flatter himself by thinking that.”

“Is he really a good man?”

“A long time ago he was not. But now he is about to be. He is coming into his morality.”

AFTER THAT it was not very hard for other girls to get to be nice to Charles. He began to rather enjoy letting them. He began to enjoy the ways he was learning of lying to Margot. He began to enjoy the way she seemed to worry when he was late and unnervous meeting her after work in the evening. And when he was with her at parties or in groups of their friends, his private ones among them, he began to enjoy the secret looks he could exchange with certain people without her ever knowing who, and why it was being done.

One night Margot found something unfortunate in his bed and sat thinking for a few minutes. She looked at him, wrapped in a towel, just out of the shower and regarding himself in a mirror. He took a long time before the mirror combing his hair and picking at his thick beard. He took a long time just looking at himself. Then, after she had picked up the thing in the bed and looked at it closely, she quite suddenly began to reconsider the advantages of having Charles, even as he reconsidered his own advantages in the mirror. She brushed another brown hair off the pillow and behind the bed.

“We ought to get married,” she said. “I’ve been thinking it over and you’re right. I guess I’m ready for it now.”

Charles turned from the mirror but did not rush over to the bed and embrace her thankfully, as she had expected. He just looked at her. She waited for him to speak. He said nothing.

“Don’t you want to marry me?”

“Sure,” he said. “Sure I do. And we’ll do it too. In a few years.”

“But just two months ago you were begging me to marry you.”

“I still am. But I’ve been thinking about it. We don’t really know each other yet.”

“It’s been ten months already. How long does it take to be sure, anyway?”

Charles came over from the dresser and sat beside her on the bed. He touched her face. “Look,” he said. “I tell you the truth. I need a better job before we can do it. I want to give you everything I can when we do it.”

“That’s not the real reason and you know it,” she said.

“What other reason would I have?”