Paul lifted his glass to the girl. She smiled at him warmly--with love, I suppose. What kind? It was a look of gratitude. A certain composition of her features. I compared that expression with the casual, collegiate, young-woman-of-the-world wave she had once given me from Dave Berne's double bed. A high-spirited, working-prostitute salute. Some part of her conscience was grateful to Paul for taking her out of professional circulation. She was, I presumed, a girl with a good deal of courage--and one with taste. A sensitive girl who could--still--accommodate her mind to the objective risks of her trade. But the attitudes of many men toward her would not be acceptable. To face them, she would have to sell pieces of her inner person. Paul had rescued her from that and her eyes thanked him. But, far more, Marcia's face expressed a maternal sentiment--warm and enveloping. He was, in a sense, her baby. Emotionally immature, romantic, and hence naïve, he had taken her for what she was not. She had played up to his assumption as an older woman to a child. In seducing him, she had seduced herself. She had adopted him as the symbol of the values she had discarded, the values that were now most precious to her because they were lost. When I thought that over, I realized it was the point of extreme hazard in their relationship. Not social pressures, but the pressures of emotions--of instincts of which neither was conscious--would be the explosive condition of their two lives. The dangerous day would be the day when he matured sufficiently to dissociate the need to love from the need to be loved. In her case, the time would come then, too--when he demanded no more mothering in bowels or brain or heart. But it might come sooner--when she tired of that one function, or extended it, or spoiled its object, or devoured it, or cast it out for its own good. For neither man nor woman can possess without being possessed, or consume without being consumed, and whether the process involves an object or another person, not to know the way of it and not to abide by the way is to be destroyed by it. The lunch went along badly. My habit of apostrophe and tirade, which usually fills such hollows as occur in talk--and forces its way, sometimes, beyond those decent opportunities--seemed inappropriate here. They had been depressed by what I had already said about the world. I guessed that, along with worries, they had hoped the visit would elicit an avuncular gaiety. They were young and in love, they thought, and should get from their elders the jocose disposition reserved for young love. I felt some of their expectancy, at any rate, and it only inhibited my rhetoric.