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to her in a long, long time that he was a nice-looking man, with pale arched brows which gave him a misleading expression of amused skepticism. He was entirely appealing, although not with the sort of striking good looks Warren Scofield had possessed. And, even though he had wit of a sort and a sense of humor, he didn’t rely much on irony; he didn’t have the slight cynicism of a man who is charming. He was easygoing and dependably kind.
    As he crossed the yard and turned the corner of the house, however, Agnes was overtaken by weariness as she made her way through the darkened front rooms to let him in the kitchen door. It had been a mistake to call him so late. It had been a mistake to invite him. Now he and she would sit and talk and have a drink. She had forgotten all about that. She had only been counting on the pleasures and comforts of familiar sex; she had only been thinking of making love. The inevitable social aspect of the evening hadn’t crossed her mind, and she despaired of the effort she would have to make. She thought it might be impossible to summon the energy to be alert and curious and hospitable. He greeted her with a kiss on the cheek and an apologetic laugh as well, because his arms were filled with all sorts of things he’d brought for her from the farm and from a recent trip to Cleveland.
    She smiled at him even as she longed to tell him to go home—she longed to be able to turn him away without any explanation and without hurting his feelings. But she smiled on and, one by one, took the packages from him and exclaimed over and remarked upon each of them. “I feel guilty every time you bring me all these things,” she said. “Not as guilty as I should feel, I guess, or I wouldn’t accept them. Betts used to accuse me of being smug! She said people were going to think I was buying all this on the black market.” Agnes was teasingly chipper and genuinely appreciative, too, but she was aware that her perkiness sounded forced. “I don’t think I’d really mind if that’s what people did think. It would give me a more . . . well . . . it would give me a reputation.” While Agnes put away the sugar and baking chocolate, the meat and the butter and eggs he had brought along, Will fixed himself a drink of the good Scotch he had bought in Cleveland, and he made a drink for Agnes, too.
    Will had served on the board of the Midwest Agricultural Council since its inception, just after the start of the war, and it had become an onerous and time-consuming business. They sat at the kitchen table, and Agnes listened to him talk wearily about the three-day board meeting in Cleveland that had kept him out of town longer than he expected. “. . . I don’t see how we can manage it with transportation compromised. We’ll have a priority status, but not high enough . . . it may be we’ll have to depend on trucks instead of the trains. Coordinated distribution of enriched fertilizer. And, I’ll tell you, I don’t see how else we’re going to get our quota. There’s more profit in other things. It won’t go down well, but we’re thinking we might have to make it mandatory to plant at least one-quarter acreage in hybrid corn.”
    He also filled her in on what was happening at the farm—which was a huge enterprise by now, and which Will had bought from Agnes’s father. She had grown up in the house in which Will now lived. But Will was not a farmer, really, although he raised livestock and vegetables for the small local market and for himself. Essentially, though, he was the manager of a complex and thriving business that produced corn. Agnes was not uninterested, but her mind wandered, going blank for moments at a time until she dragged it back to attention once again.
    “. . . not the way I see things,” Will was saying. “If they really don’t have it, that’s fine! But we stood there dickering over the price when we all three knew it was just sitting in the warehouse. Had been for a long time.