She was thinking about Charles Wright all the time now. She could not help herself. He was very little like Eric, but, like Eric, she could sense him slipping away from her. And like Eric, there was nothing she could do to hold him. This was especially hard to understand because she knew that, having a mind that was by far superior to his, she should have had very little difficulty. But she did. The marriage bothered her too. She did not know if she really wanted the thing itself or just the comfort which she expected to draw from the mere idea of a date, a point, something on which her mind could be fixed and something that promised an afterwards and at the same time an end to the uncertainty she was feeling. She did not know exactly why she wanted it; but she wanted it.

Sometimes in the night when she could not sleep she would watch the late show or listen to the radio or read textbooks from school which she should have read two years before. And sometimes she would walk, not with direction, but aimlessly, wherever her mood carried her body. She did not walk to be picked up by boys on the street or men in passing cars; she was faithful, she told herself, to what she was; and she was, she told herself, a girl about to be married or about to know when it was that she was going to be married. She walked because she could not sleep.

And walking one night the idea suddenly came to her that a certain airline offered special honeymoon flights to Bermuda for hesitant people who chose to wait until September to get married. It was still late August and there was still time to get married and make the special rates for September honeymooners. She thought that she should tell Charles about this immediately and not stop over for coffee the next morning with the news, when it would not be as fresh and exciting and inspirational. She went to his apartment, content with the idea that more than justified her coming to wake him after twelve, and only a little apprehensive over what she might find there. Charles was a long time coming to the door, arriving at least five minutes after her third knock. She did not want to use her key.

“What do you want?” He had opened the door only a little way and stood behind it in his robe looking out at her, with something in his face quite a long way from sleep. “What do you want?” he said again.

“Let’s have a cup of coffee. I have something good to tell you.”

Charles held the door firm, opened only as much as would allow his face to show. But that was enough to tell her everything.

“Aren’t you going to invite me in?”