“It’s because you’re like everyone else. You don’t want to think about anything. I would guess you already know a good deal but you pay no attention to what you know.”

“You just said I wasn’t like everyone else, when you talked about my being inward.”

“I didn’t say you and I were the only two inward people in the world,” he said and gave a short laugh. He didn’t often laugh. When he did, she had noticed, it sounded more like coughing.

“I’m going to take a swim.”

“Wait!” He stood still, looking at her. “Don’t. It alarms me. I had, instantly, a vision of you drowning.” His face twisted as though he were in pain. “I can’t stand watching anyone I know in the water or on the edge of a platform, even getting into a car. My children climb trees. I can’t look. The suffering is unspeakable…”

“All right, I won’t swim then.”

“You see how quickly you give in? It’s because you understand my feelings too well. I have another question, but let’s move on.” They walked. She waited with a kind of painful pleasure for what he would ask next. There was something about it that reminded her of modeling. It was as if he could, through her answers, paint a portrait of her. In the same way, when she’d been at the Art Students League, that she had wanted to step off the platform and run to see what the painter had made of her, so now she would like to have asked him how the portrait was coming along. He was silent for a moment, absorbed, apparently, in the placing of his small, white, delicately boned feet in larger footprints which disappeared a few yards ahead into the water.

“You see what I’m doing?” he asked. “It’s a kind of humiliation, training perhaps. I don’t like to use what other people have used—foot space in this instance. Whose footprints are these? Perhaps it is someone with some horrible fungus disease, or a woman with flabby boneless feet like pork. Now, the question. No. I won’t ask it. I know the answer. I think you sleep around a good deal. I would guess you do it because you’re afraid to refuse—anything. Now, listen to me. You mustn’t do it any more. It’s an insult, given and taken. It is a form of terrible silliness…there will be consequences later on you can’t even imagine. Real morality is fundamentally good psychology—good sense if you like. There’s a time for sleeping around and a time for it to stop.”