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least, a tremendous sympathy for that sort of weakness—a person’s inability either to control his behavior by his own standards or to discipline his standards, down to the last shred of conscience, to fit his behavior—even though in particular situations it sometimes annoyed me. Everything that had happened with Miss Rankin could have been high sport—the groveling, the hysterics, the numerous other things that I’ve not felt like sharing by recording them—had she kept hard control of her integrity; but her error, I feared, was that she would recriminate herself for some time afterwards for having humbled herself in fact, and not in fun, and mine was in not walking out when I’d started to, regardless of her hysterics. Had I done so I’d have preserved my own tranquillity and allowed Miss Rankin to regain hers by despising me instead of both of us. I had remained, I think, both out of a sense of chivalry, to which I often inclined though I didn’t believe in it, and out of a characteristic disinclination to walk out on any show, no matter how poor or painful, once I’d seen the first act.
    But there was a length of time beyond which I could not bear to be actively displeased with myself, and when that time began to announce its approach—about seven-fifteen—I went to sleep. Only the profundity and limited duration of my moods kept me from being a suicide: as it was, this practice of mine of going to bed when things got too awful, this deliberate termination of my day, was itself a kind of suicide, and served its purpose just as efficiently. My moods were little men, and when I killed them they stayed completely dead.
    The buzzer from the front door woke me at nine o’clock, and by the time I got up and put a robe on, Joe Morgan and his wife were at my door. I was surprised, but I invited them in cheerfully, because I knew as soon as I opened my eyes that sleep had changed my emotional scenery: I felt fine. Rennie Morgan, to whom I was introduced, was by no means my idea of a beautiful woman; she looked like an outdoorsman’s wife. Rather large-framed, blond, heavier than I, strong-looking, and exuberant, she was not the type of woman whom one (or at least this one) thinks of instinctively in sexual terms. Yet of course there I was, appraising her in sexual terms: no doubt my afternoon’s adventure influenced both the nature and the verdict of my appraisal.
    “Can I offer you anything to eat?” I asked her, and I was pleased to see that both of them were apparently in good spirits.
    “No, thanks,” Joe smiled; “we’ve eaten enough for three already.”
    “We saw your car out front,” Rennie said, “and wondered whether the plane had gotten in from Baltimore yet.”
    “You Morgans will track a man to his very lair!” I protested.
    Because we all seemed to be feeling friendly, and because Joe and Rennie had the good sense not to make a cause célèbre out of a fait accompli, if I may say so, I fetched bottles of ale from the case I had on ice down in the kitchen and told them the whole story of my day, omitting none but the most decidedly indelicate details (and those more from my own embarrassment than from Rennie’s, who seemed able to take it straight), by way of entertainment.
    We got on extremely well. Rennie Morgan, though lively, seemed to be just a trifle unsure of herself; her mannerisms—like the habit of showing excruciating hilarity by squinting her eyes shut and whipping her head from side to side, or her intensely excited gestures when speaking—were borrowed directly from Joe, as were both the matter and the manner of her thinking. It was clear that in spite of the progress she’d evidently made toward being indistinguishable from her husband, she was still apprehensive about the disparity between them. Whenever Joe took issue with a statement she’d made, Rennie would argue the point as vigorously as possible, knowing that that was what he expected her to do, but there was in