And then, with the touch of sullenness: ‘Believe me, that’s the one thing I learned in that hell-hole — the people who aren’t prepared to take a stand somewhere, and sometimes on bad issues, won’t make a stand, they sell out. And don’t say: Sell out to what? If it were easy to say exactly what, we wouldn’t all have to make stands on bad issues sometimes. We shouldn’t be afraid to be naive and foolish, that’s the one thing we should none of us be afraid of…’ He began lecturing me again. I liked being lectured. I liked what he said. And yet as he talked, again unaware of me — I swear he had forgotten I was there — I was looking at him, from the safety of his having forgotten me, and I saw his pose, standing with his back to the window in a way that was like a caricature of that young American we see in the films — sexy he-man, all balls and strenuous erection. He stood lounging, his thumbs hitched through his belt, fingers loose, but pointing as it were to his genitals — the pose that always amuses me when I see it on the films, because it goes with the young, unused, boyish American face — the boyish, disarming face, and the he-man’s pose. And Saul stood lecturing me about the pressures of society to conform, while he used the sexy pose. It was unconscious but it was directed at me, and it was so crude I began to be annoyed. There were two different languages being spoken to me at the same time. Then I noticed he looked different. Earlier I had kept looking at him, uneasy, because of how I was expecting to see something different from what he was, and seeing the thin bony man in loose hanging clothes. He was wearing clothes that fitted him. They looked new. I realized he must have gone out and bought new clothes. He wore new neat blue jeans, tight-fitting, and a close dark blue sweater. He looked slight, with the fitting new clothes, and yet he still looked wrong, the shoulders being too broad, and the jutting bones of his hips. I broke into the monologue, and asked if he had bought new clothes simply because I had said what I had that morning. He frowned, and replied stiffly, after a pause, that he didn’t want to look a hick — ‘Any more than I have to.’ I felt uncomfortable again, and said: ‘Hadn’t anyone told you before that your clothes were hanging on you?’ He said nothing, it was as if I hadn’t spoken, his eyes were abstracted. I said: ‘If no one told you, well, your mirror must have.’ He laughed gruffly, and said: ‘Lady, I don’t enjoy looking into mirrors these days, I used to think of myself as a good-looking boy.’ He intensified the sexy, lounging pose as he said these words. I could see him as he was when his flesh fitted his bone-structure: broad, solid, a strong fair-coloured man glistening with health, with cool greyish eyes, shrewdly measuring. But the new neat clothes intensified the discordancy in his appearance; he looked all wrong, I realized he looked ill, there was an unhealthy whiteness in his face. And yet still he lounged, not looking at me, Anna; but directing sexual challenge at me. I thought how odd that this was the same man who was capable of such real perception about women, such a simple warmth in the form of the words he used. I nearly challenged him in his turn, saying something like: What the hell do you mean by using that grown-up language to me, and then standing there like a heroic cowboy with invisible revolvers stuck all over your hips? But there was a great space between him and me, he started talking again, lecturing. Anyway I said I was tired and went off to bed.