Annie, for all that she is an innocent abroad in the United States at one of its great moments of change—the waning days of the Depression, the acceleration into World War II, the accompanying end to so many certainties—is, despite her lack of schooling, no fool. She sees herself, she sees her context, and she learns about one in terms of the other. “‘Everybody teaches me,’ she said ironically, ‘as if I were the world’s village idiot.’ ” She observes herself with Walter, and what she sees is crucial: that, making love to her, he “invaded her…” and that “she fled him even as she lay there so passively.” Such moments are essential Paula Fox: the disgust with others, but also with oneself, and the sense—despite a need to merge, physically or psychically, with others—that one does so at a great expense. She writes, of course, about the price one pays for giving oneself, for tempting others to believe that one is accessible to them: the cost of being lonely, needful, generous—human.