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this arbitrariness is probably inevitable, and at any rate is apparently necessary if one would reach the ends he desires.
    Which brings me back to Miss Peggy Rankin. “Get your keys,” I said. “I’ll wait for you out in the car.”
    “No! Jake !” she fairly shrieked, and jumped off the bed. I was caught at the door and embraced from behind, under my arms. “Oh, God, don’t go away yet!” Hysteria. “Please, don’t run out on me now! I’m sorry I made you angry!” She was pulling me as hard as she could, back into the room.
    “Come on now; cut it out. Get hold of yourself.” A forty-year-old pickup’s beauty, when it is preserved at all, is fragile, and Peggy’s hysteria, added to her previous weeping, left little of loveliness in her face, which normally was long, tan, unwrinkled, and not unattractive.
    “Will you stay? Please, don’t walk out that door—don’t pay attention to anything I said a while ago!”
    “I don’t know what to do,” I said truthfully, trying to assimilate this outburst. “This whole thing means more to you than it does to me. That’s no criticism of anybody. I’m really afraid I might louse it up for you, if I haven’t already.”
    I was squeezed tightly.
    “I’m in too deep to quit, Jake! If we don’t go to bed now I’ll go crazy.”
    “Nonsense.”
    Peggy’s voice bordered on unintelligibility. “You’re humiliating me! Don’t make me beg you, for God’s sake!”
    By this tune she stood to lose either way. We went back to the bed: what ensued was, for me at least, pure discomfort, and it was of a nature to become an unpleasant memory for her, too, whether she enjoyed it at the time or not. It was embarrassing because she abandoned herself completely to an elaborate gratitude that implied her own humiliation—and because my own mood was not complementary to hers. Her condition remained semi-hysterical and masochistic: she scarcely permitted me to move, flagellated herself verbally, and treated me like a visiting deity. No doubt about it, the old girl had been hard up; she did her best to make grand opera out of nature’s little cantus firmus, and if she didn’t succeed it was more my fault than hers, for she strove elaborately. Another time I might have enjoyed it—that sort of voluptuous groveling can be as pleasant to indulge as it is on occasion to indulge in—but that day was not my day. That day had begun badly, had developed tediously, and was climaxing uncomfortably, if not distastefully: I was always uneasy with women who took their sexual transports too seriously, and Miss Rankin was not the sort whom one could leave shuddering and moaning on the bed knowing it was all just good clean fun.
    That is how I left her, at five o’clock. At four forty-five she had begun, as I’d rather expected, to express hatred for me, whether feigned (this kind of thing can be sensuous sport) or sincere I couldn’t say, since her eyes were closed and her face averted. What she said, throatily, was “God damn your eyes, God damn your eyes, God damn your eyes…” in rhythm with what happened to be in progress at the time, and I was not so committed to my mood that it didn’t strike me as funny. But I was weary of dramatics, genuine or not, amusing or not, and when things reached their natural denouement I was glad enough to make my exit, forgetting entirely about Miss Rankin’s keys. The lady had talent, but no discipline. I’m sure we neither wished to see the other again.
    I ate at a roadstand outside Wicomico and finally got back to my room at six-thirty, feeling terrible. I was a man of considerable integrity within the limits of a given mood, but I was short on endurance. I felt bad already about this Peggy Rankin—irritated that at her age she hadn’t yet learned how to handle her position, how to turn its regrettable aspects as much as possible to her own advantage—and at the same time very much sympathetic with her weakness. I had, abstractly at