“Why don’t you spare some of your self-pity for her?” Max asked Jake. “She seems to have been in more trouble than your pal, Brody.”

“She lied.”

“She omitted to tell you certain things.”

“Hunh!”

“Only a kid,” muttered Max.

“She lied.”

“So what!” retorted Max angrily. “You’ve never lied?”

“Not about something like that,” Jake said.

“You’ve never been in a position where you felt you had to. You’re so foolish with your truth-telling categories! You think the world is as easy for everyone?”

“It’s not been easy for me either!” cried Jake.

Eva said, “I don’t know what this is all about, Max, but lying is lying.”

“No. That’s just it. And you don’t know what it’s about.”

“You’re on her side,” Jake said indignantly.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Max cried. “I just want you to think about it. You haven’t said a thing that would convince me you cared about her at all! Your vanity is wounded!”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” said Jake plaintively.

“I can see that.”

Jake got to his feet. Max, as a sudden and inexplicable panic possessed him, grabbed Jake’s arm. “Take it easy,” he said. “I know you feel bad, I was just trying to understand. But what happened to her?”

“Who?” demanded Eva.

“A girl,” Max said shortly. “Fern and I picked her up on the road to the convention.”

“You never told me.”

“It wasn’t important,” he said, by which he meant she wouldn’t have been interested. She heard the unspoken truth. She said she would have been interested, as though he had in fact spoken aloud. Yes, she was shrewd; Max would give her that.

Before Jake left that evening, Max had, upon learning that he wanted to enlist in the army, given him the name of a lawyer who might be able to straighten out his record. Eva had been wild at Max’s abetting Jake’s joining an imperialist army. For one second, he thought he’d heard her say she’d report him to the party, but then told himself she couldn’t have said it. It must have been his own inner voice. No, Eva had grown silent, as though at last he’d really shocked her. She was given to political shock.

But somehow, in the conversation about law and enlistment and lawyers, he’d managed to get from Jake Annie’s last address.

He hardly glanced at Jake when he left, looking instead at the wet outline of Jake’s body on the couch. Eva came up behind him and put her arms around his waist. She leaned against him. He had the fancy that he was carrying her on his back.

“Max?” she questioned in a low voice.

“I’m out of cigarettes,” he said shortly. “I’ll go out and see if the drugstore is open.”