At twenty-­four, two years out of college and just beginning his assistant instructorship, he had had his second affair—if the ten or twelve minutes in bed with the red-headed Darlene at home at the age of seventeen could be called an affair at all. He lived in a rooming house on West 88th Street and his landlady fell in love with him. She was Viennese, twenty years older than he, still beautiful, a spirited romantic woman with a passionate interest in the ideas of the young as much as in the young themselves. His inexperience had been no barrier to their love; she understood it at once and, by a rare intuition, at the beginning she assumed for him the responsibilities of love-­making. She did not reproach him (as a young girl might have done, feeling herself unloved) when their first night came to little; and if she was amused, she kept it to herself. It was the kind of affair which every young man should have in his teens; that it had come to him a good five years later did not lessen its value. The relationship proved an ideal one for him; he benefited enormously by it. Friends remarked the change in him, women especially, who took more notice of his personality than they had been in the habit of doing—though this may only have been because he had not been aware of these things and now saw responses, if not actual invitations, where before he had seen nothing; unlike so many other men, he never took it for granted that he was attractive to women. Curiously enough, his landlady’s husband played almost as much of a part in this ideal relationship as she did; he was a casual but lusty European with an extramarital life of his own, and on those occasions when he was at home, the three of them had wonderful companionable evenings filled with good talk and good music, followed by midnight suppers which were an understood prelude to an undemanding love or love-­making.

Following this, there was a small succession of other women, never young girls, and none of them lasting long. It was he who saw to that. He had become one of that countless number of young American men who lived their own lives, went their own way with no emotional entanglements, served as the ideal extra man at dinner parties or as a fourth at bridge, to be trusted (justifiably) by mothers in his home town whose daughters were visiting in the city for the first time—popular, uninvolved, speculated about, envied by other men and secretly yearned after by women, and who made love, if at all, only when it was perfectly clear beforehand (to him if not to her) that there were no strings attached. Then, when he was in his thirties, he met Ethel. . . .