"May be for some people, Fanshaw."
"No, I don't mean that. O, you are so lackadaisical, Fanshaw," Nan said bitterly. "I mean something more active.... The three of us conquering, shutting the fog and the misery out, all that helpless against us. But I'm talking like a book."
"You are a little, Nan," said Wenny laughing.
Nan felt what she wanted to say slipping out of her mind, ungraspable. The three of them walked on in silence, arm in arm, with Nan in the middle. Beginnings of sentences flared and sputtered out in her mind like damp fireworks. Slowly the yellow fog, the cold enormous fog that had somehow a rhythm of slow vague swells out at sea sifted in upon her, blurred the focus of herself that had been for a moment intensely sharp. She so wanted to say something that would make that moment permanent, that would pin down forever the sudden harmony of the three of them so that she could always possess it, no matter what happened after. Epigram, that was the word. There had been Greeks who had cut the flame of an instant deep on stone in broad letters for centuries to read.
"I wish we could walk like this always."
Her throat was dry. At the sound of her thin voice, all her thoughts scuttled into the dark like cockroaches in a kitchen cupboard. Her mind smoothed to vacancy.
"How do you mean?" asked Wenny.
"Well, here we are," said Fanshaw in a singsong tone.
The Swansea, in gold gothic letters shaded with black, stared at her from a wide glass door. Beyond white steps another glass door, unmarked. Nan remembered how she used to feel when she was a child and people were getting ready to go into dinner and bedtime came. She turned her back on the sourly familiar letters. Opposite a few twigs of trees leaned into the warm tent of light from a streetlamp out of dark immensity of fog. The light slanting out through the glass door gave a gleam on Fanshaw's glasses that hid his eyes. She pressed ever so slightly his long limp hand and Wenny's hard hand. Wenny's face was flushed from the rawness of the fog and there was a glint in his eyes that made her catch her breath joyously. She wanted to say something. They turned away, raised their hands vaguely and walked off. Fanshaw had leaned over and said something to Wenny that had made him laugh. The door closed behind her. She had a glimpse of the letters The Swansea inside out. She took her key out of her purse and unlocked the inner door. She hated Fanshaw, his glasses that hid his eyes, his long limp hands. They had gone off carelessly laughing. And Wenny too, with the grime round his collar and his shambling walk like an Italian laborer's. She pushed open the sliding door of the elevator that had a familiar everyday smell of dust and machine oil. The door slid to behind her. She put her finger on the button marked 4. It was the girl in the Fadettes who had gone off with a brown man, garlicky, with bright teeth like the Greeks' were who made epigrams. Nan closed her eyes as the elevator started to rise. She was very tired.