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artist, you see, that he hates the Jews so much. He wants to get rid of the competition.”
    There came a day when she felt impelled to speak out, to register a protest; they had been laughing about J. B. Priestley: “He is too nice a man,” they said, “to be a novelist. So sweet and nice, so adorable, one wants to strangle him.”
    “That’s not fair,” she said. “He really loves his characters, their goodness is real,” a statement that amused them greatly. Another time she defended English cooking: “It’s because they don’t really mind what they eat; they’re indifferent to material comfort.” Her romance with England became a running joke with them; they made up grand love affairs for her: “Our little Louisa,” they said, “will wind up a duchess.” She bought a silver-gray dress with flowing sleeves and black satin cuffs, a dark gray hat with a rakish brim, long jet earrings; she took to wearing her hair in a chignon at the nape of her neck, like her employer’s, thinking it made her look older, until they insisted she unpin it again. It was comforting to be petted and teased like that, though it did not solve the great question of what would become of her.
    It took her months to figure out that many of her new friends were Communists. Her own political activity was confined to giving sixpences to canvassers for the Independent Labour Party—because they were anti-Fascist—and signing a petition for relief for the unemployed miners. She was more affected by the sight of the whey-faced little girl who stood begging at the entrance to the Tube on certain winter nights; to her she gave whole shillings, and sometimesrolls, wrapped in napkins, that she took from the baskets at the café.
    Not everyone who frequented the place was a refugee. There were also painters from Chelsea who rolled their own cigarettes and consumed vast quantities of cheap wine; there were bearded Oxford graduates in scruffy tweed jackets and stained ties who wrote for the left-wing journals and carried on tremendous political arguments, though they were all ostensibly on the same side. Sometimes the more erudite of the refugees were called on to settle a question about collectivization, or Rosa Luxemburg, or the peregrinations of Trotsky, always referred to fondly as the Old Man.
    One of the café’s English denizens was a backer of the
New Examiner
, a quarterly that had recently published an account of the Nazi persecutions. But he was also a poet, he told her, on the night he first sat down at her table, in fact primarily a poet, only he could no longer turn his back on what was happening in the world. Even poets had to get their hands dirty now, he said, somewhat incongruously, since his own looked very soft and clean, with pale stubby fingers. He had been noticing her, he said, for some time: what would she like to drink?
    His name was Phillip Hallowell. He had a house in Bloomsbury and manufacturing relations up north who wanted him to go into the business, an idea he referred to with scorn; he had studied law at Cambridge, but quit in disgust. Disgust and scorn were things he expressed very often, but not when it came to her. She was delicious, he told her, the first time he took her out to dinner—they were on their way to an Italian place in Soho, which he assured her she would love, and she was telling him about a Goya show at the National Gallerythat she’d been to the previous Sunday. “How did I ever find someone so delicious?” he cried, interrupting her, and said how marvelous it was to be around people who weren’t English, how irredeemably boring he found Englishwomen in particular. “The very sound of their damn voices makes me wince.” After their third dinner, when he was taking her home, and the cab was stopped at a red light in Torrington Square, he gestured at a handsome brick house opposite. “Would you like to live there? Shall we buy it when we’re married?”
    She never really knew why he