Carl looked at Lucy and saw that a wistfully surprised expression was liking his words and trying to explain them to her mind. It was the look of a baby flirting with an incongruous sophistication and striving to create a fusion between ingenuousness and a certain sensual wisdom learned in the alleys of life. “Ah, these starved dwarfs, how little it takes to please them,” Carl sighed to himself. After the wiry, tawdry spectacle of the vaudeville show, with its weary acrobats and falsetto singers, the four visited a grimly gaudy Chinese restaurant, where the Orient becomes an awkward prostitute for Occidental dollars, and while Petersen and Katie gossiped about their friends Carl and Lucy traded hesitant sentences and threw little sensual appeals from the steady gaze of their eyes. Lucy, with her look of a stunned infant, made him feel vaguely troubled--the ghost of a fatherly impulse. After the meal the group separated, since the girls lived in different parts of the city, and as Carl and Lucy rode in the trolley car they tried to make their anticipations more at ease, with the veils of conversation. “Why do you live?” asked Carl, abruptly, to see whether one or two words in her answer might be different from what he expected. “What a funny question!” cried Lucy. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I wanta be happy. I never am mosta the time, but then I’m always hopin’ that things’ll change. Why’d you ask me that funny question?” The fumbling bewilderment of her words irritated and saddened Carl, simultaneously, and in an effort to slay the reaction he simulated a compassion. “Happiness doesn’t always speak the truth,” he said, struggling to mould his words so that they could reach her understanding. “It’s sometimes a beautiful lie. You understand? A beautiful, soft, desperate lie. And we say the lie because we want to change ourselves and somebody else to something that can make us forget our smallness. You see, we are not very large, either in our bodies or in our thoughts, and we try to make ourselves several feet taller, tall enough to put our heads on a level with the trees, tall enough to imagine that the wind respects us. Beautiful, desperate lies. Do you understand?” “I don’t quite understand you,” said Lucy. “You speak so different from all the men I know, so different, and yet I like the way you speak. Do you mean it’s not good for anyone to be happy?” “If your happiness doesn’t put you to sleep it’s good for you. When people try to be happy for more than a little while it makes them sleepy. And, you see, it’s much better to be very much alive, or very dead.”