She thought about the brown hair and about Eric and the girls at school, and she felt about to explode. But she had made something solid inside herself from all her sufferings, something that took complete control just before emotion came; and so it allowed her to sit there while he talked on and on about the guilt he felt over his job, about how he wanted them to live in style, about how hard it was for an almost confirmed bachelor to change his habits quickly, about the summer riots and the possibility of concentration camps for blacks and his daily musing about leaving the country. But he said not one word about the brown hair.

“What does that leave for us?” she had said after Charles had run quite out of excuses.

“We’ll do it for sure in a little while,” he said. “When everything’s settled.”

“Maybe I won’t be around then,” she said flatly.

Charles smiled, his newly acquired confidence shining through his teeth. “You’ll be around,” he said.

And she was always around after that. Margot made it a point to always be around, unexpectedly, after work or late at night when she knew he expected her to be at home. She made a very special point of telling all their friends that they were planning to be married, and was especially decisive in announcing to a fellow who called her at home when Charles was there, that she was now engaged and expected to be married within a month, or two at the most. Charles, sitting at her table and pensively eating the dinner she had cooked for him, was very nervous and said nothing after she had hung up. That night he went home early and when she called him later, at 1:30 A.M., she could tell by his breathing and carefully worded sentences that he had been drinking and that he was not alone.