“It’s late. If I drink coffee I won’t be able to get to sleep and I have to work tomorrow.”

“We can just talk, then. Can’t I come in?”

Charles made his words very precise now. It took a great deal of control because there were hundreds of words in his mouth all trying to say different things about the different feelings that were going through him. “I really wish you wouldn’t,” he said, selectively. “I really wish you would just go home and come back tomorrow morning for the coffee.”

She stood in the hall and understood what was in the house and why his head had to be held against the edge of the door. And she also understood now just why she had come. The special rates for honeymooners was no new thought; her mind had just made it convenient.

“You have company?”

“No. Of course not. No.”

“Can’t I spend the night here?”

“I really wish you wouldn’t.”

Then there was the sound of someone’s yawn from the bedroom; a sound, it seemed to Margot, that was deliberate and domestic and possessive at the same time. It was a bored sound and it made her go all tight inside when he, in some play at slyness, shifted his eyes momentarily from her face to the direction of the sound.

And now something went out of her, away, distant, ghostlike in its passage from her as she stood there. But Charles did not see it go and for a moment she felt sorry for him, almost as sorry for him as she was feeling for herself.

“I just came by to tell you,” she began. Then she made her voice louder. “I just came by to say that you’re right. There’s no sense in playing marriage. If we’re not going to do it we might as well stop playing house.”

Charles just looked at her.

“I just wanted to tell you,” she went on, “there wasn’t much left in me. But what there was, you could have had.”

“What are you trying to say?” Charles was afraid now of losing the peg that was solely responsible for holding his new self together. He was afraid of looking at the bird just after it had been crushed. And he was afraid that Karen, in the bedroom, would hear the sound of fear in his voice and not think him a man from whom she could learn things.

“What are you trying to say?”

“Nothing.”

“Why don’t you just go on home. We can talk tomorrow.”

“No.”

“We could have breakfast. I don’t really have to go to work if I don’t want to.”

“No.”

“Anyway,” he said very rapidly, “we’ll talk about it later.”

“Sure.”