“Do you see that woman passing by?” he asked. “She has a face half like a twitching mouse and half like a poised cat. I have known such women. They are continually robbing certain men of emotions in order meekly to hand back their thefts to other men. With a mixture of cruelty and weak submission they entertain their own emptiness.” He looked away from her, expecting a silence or the affront of cracked laughter and preparing to leave. Her answer swung his head toward her. “You may be speaking to such a woman. Life has undressed me to all people except myself, and I don’t know what I am. I think that I was born to be a nun, but something kicked me down a dirty hallway and when I woke up there were many hands reaching for me and it didn’t seem important to me whether they took me or not. But I think that I was born to be a nun.... Does that interest you?” He stared at her with his mouth almost describing a perfect O and his eyes opened to a wild uncertainty. For a moment he felt that they were both quite dead and that her spirit had been ravished by waiting words. “In God’s name, what have you been doing?” he cried. “Playing a part, with the assistance of your indifferent slang,” she said. “Why?” “I started out by talking to you as I do to most men. You broke into a rough speech and I parried as usual. The evening was commencing in its usual convincing manner. Then I began to see that you were acting. There was a strain on your face, and sometimes you stopped in the middle of a delicate simile.... I knew that I might be wrong, so I kept on talking as you expected me to talk.” On her face was the smile of a beggar whose tinselled metaphors have been pummeled and disheveled by surface realities. The plump curves of her face seemed to fit less snugly beneath the flat deceit of rouge. “I am a fool,” he said. “Your eyes told me something, but I spat upon it. I think that you had better leave me.” “I have no intention of leaving you,” she said. They sat and stared at each other. “Do you give yourself to different men every night?” he asked, as though his sophistication, in an instant curve, had retreated to an anxious child long concealed within him. “I give them what they are able to take, and that is little. They want to clutch me for a time, but I don’t feel them unless they stop my breathing. A man walks into a house, wipes his feet on the mat, spits into one of the cuspidors, and leaves with a vacant smile on his face.” “Why do you want them to come in?” “They give me money for whiskey and leisure time in which I can read. I’ve never been able to find a simpler way of getting these things.” The explanation was clear and delicate to him. “Of course, the whiskey makes you sneer like a queen, and the books bring you affairs with better men,” he said.