Fern had been tired last night, and she looked better when she was tired. The morning’s energy, her bursts of excitement at the coming convention gave her a look of craving he found repugnant. Although she and Eva were around the same age, Fern looked older. Fern would age fast, he thought, looking at her profile. She glanced at him with a touch of challenge as though she’d suspected what was in his mind.

She’d been a pretty little girl in a sharp, brunette way, dark and fast-moving, her narrow feet shod in saddle shoes, the tips always carefully whitened, the brown saddle gleaming with polish. She wore no ornaments, only plain blouses or her sweater “set.” She wasn’t as trim these days as she had once been. Her worn-down heels, the stains on her clothes, the uneven hems of her dresses bespoke neglect. But she still wore gloves. Those gloves!

Eva had not been as pretty, except for a striking small-waisted figure and beautiful narrow ankles. In the darkened rooms where she and Max made love any time they could, he would forget her sharp voice, its complacency fed and fattened by meals of Engels and R. Palme Dutt, by party meetings in dusty boardinghouse rooms in Berkeley, by faction and dissension and discussion. In those days, only a few years ago, that eager, fresh-skinned, heavyfleshed girl, every feature of her round face imprinted on his neck and shoulder and belly, seemed to have no connection with the young functionary tough, la commandante, as he called her. But she was loving with their son—a kind of sexual romanticism excluded the infant from the daylight world of politics and tied him to those darkened rooms of love and its motions.

But, he thought, most of the party women, especially the younger ones like Eva and Fern, suffered a touch of disjunction in their beings. He didn’t understand it. Last night, out of his boredom perhaps, out of a deliberate misreading of “Comrade,” he had looked at her with a certain tentative sexual inquiry. He hadn’t been fully aware of it himself. But she must have sensed something. Abruptly, in the middle of a sentence, she’d arisen and said, “I need my rest.” Her voice had been high, thin; she’d avoided his eyes. At first, he wondered if the chile had given her indigestion. He’d observed before that she was one to pick at food and push it away. There was a lot of distaste in Fern.