He kept his head pressed into his spread palms and commenced to sob. He sounded like a rooting pig, smothering great sniffles and coughs in his two hands. I could not touch him, although I wanted to; I dared not touch him, although he needed just the slightest touch, the merest sign at that moment more than anything else in the world. But my rooms were not the world, and his world was surely not there, in that room. And so I opened the door for him and stood outside it, and waited for him to come out because I had, all at once, the greatest fear of having him behind me. “Come and talk whenever you want,” I told him. He still sat on the sofa, his eyes red, his face blotched with very red and very white areas; sniffing, he sat there. I stepped out further into the hall. “I want you to know that you can come back to talk—to talk—whenever you want.”

He rose meekly from the sofa and came out the door, toward me. I backed away. He looked hurt, even more, and I was sorry.

“I’m all right now, Dennis,” he said. He looked awfully tired. He looked at me a long moment longer, as if daring himself to say something more, and then he turned and went away down the hall.

I lay on my bed after I had made sure that he was not standing around in the hall and waiting before he knocked again. I lay on the bed and wondered at how close I had come to touching him. I thought about Betty and how late she was getting there and how I needed to ask her to spend the night, for company and for something else. I hated to have Betty in my bed in the morning: it was a small bed and she did not know what to do with her legs. Besides, she was a huge feeder and it disgusted me to have to eat with her and watch her eat breakfast. Still, I needed to have her there and I could endure anything as long as I had a girl there—for other things.

I thought about those other things.