“You know it isn’t,” she said, breaking away from him.

He shrugged and gave her a strained smile. They went to bed and lay sleepless, listening to the rain beating against the windows.

A week later, when Max and Eva were in Los Angeles, he’d seen Annie standing in front of a movie house. She’d looked toward him once, then quickly away. He didn’t know whether she’d seen him or not. Eva had hurried him on. They were due at a committee meeting about the pamphlet. Max had glanced over his shoulder in time to see Annie enter the movie house with a man.

Then a few days later he’d written her a note.

The instant he mailed it, he was ashamed. The short paragraph had held nothing but gross patronage, offering help for troubles he could not guess at. He thought about nothing else the rest of the day; he realized that his shame came from the deception he was trying to practice.

The real reason he wanted to get in touch with her was curiosity, a wish to interfere with her, to get her in front of him, to look at her as long as he wished, to question her as much as he wanted. Max’s response to Jake’s story, the boy’s feeble, pathetic protestation of betrayed love, revealed to Max, the more he had brooded upon it, the extent to which the girl had taken hold of his imagination. To write the letter, he had told himself that he was acting in the best tradition of social responsibility, a political priest concerned about the erring stray outside the saved flock. And upon that thought came the question, Was it because she was a stray that he was so interested in her?

The strays that interested the party were not road wanderers and seamen’s girls with unidentifiable accents. A Negro shipscaler, or a member of a reactionary union, a textile worker from the South, a union official, class workers such as printers, anyone working on the waterfront, but not a girl like that. He wasn’t desirable himself, a man whose face stiffened when Balzac was referred to as railroad-owning bourgeois or who quibbled about Rousseau, whose income came from “timber barons,” who, in fact, need not ever work if he chose not to. Eva gave him, he thought, his only legitimacy. She was real; she was correct, even her impulses were undeviating as though charged by an instinct entirely political. She never said the wrong thing; she never thought the wrong thing.

Several months passed but Annie did not answer his note.