We talked of the news, of the airlift to Berlin which, by its very existence, constituted an immense Appeasement. We discussed the presidential candidates. We talked awhile of women's clothes, of the veterans' organization currently holding a convention in the city, and I described the house Ricky and I were building south of Miami, drawing a diagram on the tablecloth with a knife. The effort to keep talk going--to find topics and to change them before attempt was disclosed--made me restive. Paul wasn't helping any. He'd eaten hungrily enough and then sat back--jerking and fidgeting about, making faces, pulling his nose, simpering, and smirking moonily. She'd held up her end. The trouble was, of course, that none of us was engaged in honest behavior. Paul wanted to say: What do you think of her--and us? Paul wanted me to say: She's lovely--and I'm sure you'll be happy. I had become doubly certain--without yet entirely appreciating why--that it would never turn out. I had been generically sure, even before--just as Ricky had been sure: Paul wasn't constructed to marry a harlot and live happily ever after. I wanted to say: For God's sake, cooky, send her back to her trade; she'll find some other guy, eventually; she's not for you. Then I wanted to go up sixteen floors to my apartment with my troubles, my work, no women, no nephew. What did the girl want to say? I looked at her again--at her opalescent hair and her blue eyes. And she looked back. For a moment, the shadow stood still--stood still, and dissipated. A wanton expression, brief and Lilith-like, reshaped the sharp, carmine edges of her mouth. She saw me not as the uncle of her now-beloved, but as the detached person--another man--and in this seeing me, she involuntarily recalled her long affair with lust. I have heard a woman say that, by merely quivering her underlip in a certain fashion, she had been able to change the tone, attention, and interest of nine men in ten with whom she'd ever talked--and there was nothing in her history to make me doubt the statement. And I have heard another woman say that all there was to Rudolph Valentino was the dilation of his nostrils. Watching Marcia's mouth, I could understand the sense of such matters. So I was sure of still another thing. Hattie Blaine had been dubious of her. Hattie had made the suggestion--the to me profoundly immoral suggestion--of tempting this girl. Hattie had done it out of an unconscious notion that Marcia had some point in her nature which could not be lent to the kind of marriage Paul would need. It wasn't money. It was mood. Marcia caught me making this observation. She blushed a little, glanced at the table, and then raised her eyes--but whether anxiously or in a repetition of the look, I could not tell. Passionate women are seldom ashamed of their passion.