He thought she might mean just the vigor of his lovemaking. They were both in a sweat, in her sunny bed with its view of a horse-farm riding ring, and she, underneath him, was doubly drenched. They had begun seeing each other in April; they were discovered and cut off before autumnal weather arrived. He remembered her in bright cotton frocks, animated at parties afloat in summer lightness, all her animation secretly directed at him. She was warm with Ann, his wife, and he was hearty with Sam, her husband, though even here there was inequality. She seemed genuinely to like Ann and, when with Frank, would wonder aloud how he could ever think of leaving his lovely wife. Each tryst, on the other hand, strengthened his impression that Sam—big, red-faced, his heavy head lowered with clumsy, shortsighted menace—was unworthy of her, and her remaining in her marriage was a sign of weakness, a meek acceptance of daily pollution.

“You have anything better to offer?” Maggie had once challenged him, having pinched her lips together and decided to take the leap. Her eyes in this moment of daring had been round, like a child’s.

He felt attenuated, strained, answering weakly, “You know I’d love to be your husband. If I weren’t already somebody else’s.”

“The beautiful prisoner,” she said, gazing off as if suddenly bored. “I do think we should stop seeing each other.”

“Oh my God, no. I’ll die.”

“Well, it’s killing me. You’re not being mature. When a gentleman has had his fun with a lady, he takes his leave.”

He hated it when she pulled sexual rank on him. He wanted to learn but not to be instructed. “Is that how Sam would act?”

“Sam’s not so bad as you think,” she said, brushing away, with a sudden awkward hiding motion, tears that had started to her eyes, sprung by some image touched within the tense works of this suspended situation.

“Good in bed,” Frank suggested, hating the two of them. In bed: this very bed, with its view of trim stables and fenced pastures.

She ignored the jealous probe. She said, reflecting, “He has a sense of me that’s not entirely off. In his coarse way, he has manners.”

“And I don’t?”

“Frank,” she exclaimed in an exasperation that still let the tears stand in her eyes. “Why does everything always have to come back to you?”

“Because,” he could have answered, “you have made me love myself.” But there were many things he could have said to Maggie, before communications between them suddenly ceased, Sam blundering in with bullish fury and lawyerly threats, Ann receding with a beautiful wounded pride. Frank found himself Maggie’s enemy, having failed to become her husband.