Since she did not care to outwait the others she excused herself not long after eleven-thirty, and Fein graciously saw her to the door. He was a tall man, Marya saw with satisfaction; he carried himself with a certain languid assurance. So very charming, so very European . . . telling Marya that it was a pleasure to have seen her this evening and to have known, while he was abroad, that she, and no one else, occasionally entered his house. Marya laughed, saying that it had been a pleasure—an unexpected sort of pleasure.

She made an attempt to be playful, reckless, as at ease as he. But when he took hold of her hands, when she breathed in that warm intimate scent of tobacco and ashes—so familiar, so harshly fragrant—she experienced a moment of absolute fright. She might have been a young girl who had never been kissed—who had never been touched by a man.

Fein was saying half chidingly that her hands were cold; then, as if the question was related, “Are you angry?”

Marya hadn’t the strength to draw away.

“Are you angry?” he asked.

She wanted to say lightly, Why should I be angry? but she heard herself say instead, in a quavering voice, “What do you want from me?”

“Oh—everything!” Fein laughed.

MARYA HAD NEVER deeply loved anyone; Marya had never been attracted to anyone—except briefly perhaps to Emmett Schroeder. Since the day after the going-away party, Marya had declared herself inviolable—autonomous—entirely self-sufficient.

As for the cravings of others, of men—why should she honor them? why even take them seriously?

Her attitude was rarely articulated because, being shrewd as well as naturally puritanical, she avoided such occasions: she avoided being alone with men, being approached as a woman and not as a colleague. Perhaps she was a nun in her own way—she felt that Clifford Shearing might have approved. An uncloistered nun, a self-determined virgin.

(One of the young women with whom she had become friendly here complained wistfully to Marya that, despite her numerous academic honors and prizes, despite the fact that she would be moving on, with her Ph.D., to Stanford—her family, her mother in particular, seemed only to be waiting for news that she would be married. Nothing else mattered, evidently; nothing else struck them as ultimately significant. She asked if Marya’s family was like that, or were they more enlightened? “Enlightened!” Marya laughed. Then it occurred to her that Wilma never said anything—never asked anything—about her plans for the future. Nor did anyone else back home. Davy, now seventeen years old, and Joey, fifteen, gave the impression of being uneasy in her presence—vaguely embarrassed, strained—and would never have broached any personal subject whatsoever. None of them thinks of me as a woman, Marya realized.)

She supposed she had remained a virgin so long because she hadn’t exactly believed in other people—in men. In what they might bring to her that she didn’t already possess, in the most secret inchoate depths of her being.