“Now, baby, now you stay still. Here…” He let go of her for a minute and thrust a crumpled pack of cigarettes in her hand and a pencil. “Now, you write down where you live, right there on that little corner. Write it.” And she did, hopelessly.

The high-school teacher had his coat on and was standing by the door. “I won’t have time to take you home,” he said, “it’s so late. I’ve got a long ride to New Jersey, come on, I’ll put you in a taxi.”

To Annie’s astonishment, Walter Vogel came to her door the very next night.

“Hello,” he said. “I’ve come to take you to a meeting.”

He walked into the little apartment, looked at it critically, shook his head. “Hurry up. We’re going to be late as it is.”

“What meeting?”

“A discussion…maybe you’ll learn something.”

In a small loft building on lower Broadway, a dozen or so people sat in a long narrow room listening to a man speak through a stern bristle of mustache. Several people nodded to Walter as he and Annie sat down.

“I ask you,” said the man, frowning, “to consider the strange frivolity—and frivolity is by far too mild a term to describe the notorious behavior I am about to describe—of these so-called comrades who have so quickly abandoned their faith in the country of socialism, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the seat and heart of the triumphant victory of the working class over the tyranny of class repression—the faint hearts of these comrades, the soft brains of these comrades”—a man laughed somewhere behind Annie and Walter—“who are unable or, to put it more properly, refuse stubbornly to understand Comrade Stalin’s strategy. How many of us have been subjected to cries of ‘poor little Finland,’ following only by weeks the defection of those weak hearts, these Mensheviki I shall call them, with their childish and willful refusal to understand the necessity of the delaying tactics involved in Comrade Stalin’s pact with the German, Hitler? It is of utmost importance that we distinguish between tactics and strategy, Comrades, utmost…”

Walter was standing. “For the benefit of a guest, would you discuss the difference between tactics and strategy?” he asked the speaker quite formally. The speaker looked broodingly at Annie, then nodded briskly. Annie didn’t listen; she perceived, vaguely, that she was among people who saw the world she hastened through so nervously, so uncomprehendingly, as having meanings, categories, explanations that made it possible for them to know where their next thought was coming from. That Walter should be one of this group made her feel, for the moment, at rest; the speaker’s words didn’t matter; that he struggled in a thicket of lost sentences didn’t matter. Whatever it was he was talking about, he was convinced!