It wasn't money.
It was mood.
Marcia caught me making this observation. She blushed a little, glanced at the table, and then raised her eyes—but whether anxiously or in a repetition of the look, I could not tell.
Passionate women are seldom ashamed of their passion.
What she felt was not bold; it was not arch; it was not mercenary; it was—simply—an essence of her own responses. A belonging, like the curved shape of her eyebrows or the narrowness of her red nails—which she accepted as no more and no less than that, and revealed as naturally.
I wanted to go, even more.
One can pick patterns in one's life—rhythms, cadences, aggregates, cross sections, events that occur in pairs and threes—and the phenomenon is undoubtedly the result of chance. But one notices, one superimposes the pattern subjectively—and decides it is not chance but some obscure order, because one likes to feel that obscure orders occur in life. It is difficult to keep the ego perpetually lined up with statistical reality.
In twenty-four hours I'd looked at, talked to, explored, and somewhat learned three different, very handsome young women. Mrs. Yvonne Prentiss. Gwen Taylor—at Hattie's. And Marcia.
They come in threes, I thought. I thought it had been a long time since I'd met even one girl so pretty as all these. I reminded myself not to be an ass—to keep the view that grouping and variation in no way warp mathematical principle. The obsessive quality of all such ideas weighed on me. I hardly heard her account of their junket, on the preceding Saturday, to Jones' Beach.
I began to invent an excuse for present departure—to think ahead about apologizing—my work—the check, please—