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want this child, he could tell. Something had happened, that had nothing to do with the man, perhaps, that made her want a child. He could see it in the prim, stiff way she sat on the bench, in that self-abandoned trance he had always seen or imagined in pregnant women’s faces. “That needn’t delay the divorce though, I suppose.”
    “Well, I didn’t think so—until a couple of davs ago. I thought Owen would be free to marry this month.”
    “Oh. He’s married now?”
    “Yeah, he’s married,” she said with a little sigh, almost smiling.
    Guy looked down in vague embarrassment and paced a slow step or two on the asphalt. He had known the man would be married. He had expected he would have no intention of marrying her unless he were forced to. “Where is he? Here?”
    “He’s in Houston,” she replied. “Don’t you want to sit down?”
    “No.”
    “You never did like to sit down.”
    He was silent.
    “Still have your ring?”
    “Yes.” His class ring from Chicago, that Miriam had always admired because it meant he was a college man. She was staring at the ring with a self-conscious smile. He put his hands in his pockets. “As long as I’m here, I’d like it settled. Can we do it this week?”
    “I want to go away, Guy.”
    “For the divorce?”
    Her stubby hands opened in a limp ambiguous gesture, and he thought suddenly of Bruno’s hands. He had forgotten Bruno completely, getting off the train this morning. And his book.
    “I’m sort of tired of staying here,” she said.
    “We can get the divorce in Dallas if you like.” Her friends here knew, he thought, that was all.
    “I want to wait, Guy. Would you mind? Just a while?”
    “I should think you’d mind. Does he intend to marry you or not?”
    “He could marry me in September. He’d be free then, but—”
    “But what?” In her silence, in the childlike lick of her tongue on her upper lip, he saw the trap she was in. She wanted this child so much, she would sacrifice herself in Metcalf by waiting until four months before it was born to marry its father. In spite of himself, he felt a certain pity for her.
    “I want to go away, Guy. With you.”
    There was a real effort at sincerity in her face, so much that he almost forgot what she was asking, and why. “What is it you want, Miriam? Money to go away somewhere?”
    The dreaminess in her gray-green eyes was dispersing like a mist. “Your mother said you were going to Palm Beach.”
    “I might be going there. To work.” He thought of the Palmyra with a twinge of peril. It was slipping away already.
    “Take me with you, Guy? It’s the last thing I’ll ask you. If I could stay with you till December and then get the divorce—”
    “Oh,” he said quietly, but something throbbed in his chest, like the breaking of his heart. She disgusted him suddenly, she and all the people around her whom she knew and attracted. Another man’s child. Go away with her, be her husband until she gave birth to another man’s child. In Palm Beach!
    “If you don’t take me, I’ll come anyway.”
    “Miriam, I could get that divorce now. I don’t have to wait to see the child. The law doesn’t.” His voice shook.
    “You wouldn’t do that to me,” Miriam replied with that combination of threat and pleading that had played on both his anger and his love when he loved her, and baffled him.
    He felt it baffling him now. And she was right. He wouldn’t divorce her now. But it was not because he still loved her, not because she was still his wife and was therefore due his protection, but because he pitied her and because he remembered he had once loved her. He realized now he had pitied her even in New York, even when she wrote him for money. “I won’t take the job if you come out there. There’d be no use in taking it,” he said evenly, but it was gone already, he told himself, so why discuss it?
    “I don’t think you’d give up a job like that,” she challenged.
    He turned away from