The huge blanket of fur made her look like a child bundled for a snowstorm; the luxurious texture transformed the innocence of the awkward bundle into the elegance of a perversely intentional contrast: into a look of stressed sensuality. The fur was a soft brown, dimmed by an aura of blue that could not be seen, only felt like an enveloping mist, like a suggestion of color grasped not by one's eyes but by one's hands, as if one felt, without contact, the sensation of sinking one's palms into the fur's softness. The cape left nothing to be seen of her, except the brown of her hair, the blue-gray of her eyes, the shape of her mouth.
She turned to him, her smile startled and helpless. "I . . . I didn't know it would look like that."
"I did."
She sat beside him in his car as he drove through the dark streets of the city. A sparkling net of snow flashed into sight once in a while, when they went past the lights on the corners. She did not ask where they were going. She sat low in the scat, leaning back, looking up at the snowflakes. The fur cape was wrapped tightly about her; within it, her dress felt as light as a nightgown and the feel of the cape was like an embrace.
She looked at the angular tiers of lights rising through the snowy curtain, and—glancing at him, at the grip of his gloved hands on the wheel, at the austere, fastidious elegance of the figure in black overcoat and white muffler—she thought that he belonged in a great city, among polished sidewalks and sculptured stone.
The car went down into a tunnel, streaked through an echoing tube of tile under the river and rose to the coils of an elevated highway under an open black sky. The lights were below them now, spread in flat miles of bluish windows, of smokestacks, slanting cranes, red gusts of fire, and long, dim rays silhouetting the contorted shapes of an industrial district. She thought that she had seen him once, at his mills, with smudges of soot on his forehead, dressed in acid-eaten overalls; he had worn them as naturally well as he wore his formal clothes. He belonged here, too—she thought, looking down at the flats of New Jersey—among the cranes, the fires and the grinding clatter of gears.
When they sped down a dark road through an empty countryside, with the strands of snow glittering across their headlights—she remembered how he had looked in the summer of their vacation, dressed in slacks, stretched on the ground of a lonely ravine, with the grass under his body and the sun on his bare arms. He belonged in the countryside, she thought—he belonged everywhere—he was a man who belonged on earth—and then she thought of the words which were more exact: he was a man to whom the earth belonged, the man at home on earth and in control. Why, then—she wondered—should he have had to carry a burden of tragedy which, in silent endurance, he had accepted so completely that he had barely known he carried it? She knew part of the answer; she felt as if the whole answer were close and she would grasp it on some approaching day. But she did not want to think of it now, because they were moving away from the burdens, because within the space of a speeding car they held the stillness of full happiness. She moved her head imperceptibly to let it touch his shoulder for a moment.
The car left the highway and turned toward the lighted squares of distant windows, that hung above the snow beyond a grillwork of bare branches. Then, in a soft, dim light, they sat at a table by a window facing darkness and trees. The inn stood on a knoll in the woods; it had the luxury of high cost and privacy, and an air of beautiful taste suggesting that it had not been discovered by those who sought high cost and notice. She was barely aware of the dining room; it blended away into a sense of superlative comfort, and the only ornament that caught her attention was the glitter of iced branches beyond the glass of the window.
She sat, looking out, the blue fur half-slipping off her naked arms and shoulders. He watched her through narrowed eyes, with the satisfaction of a man studying his own workmanship.
"I like giving things to you," he said, "because you don't need them."
"No?"
"And it's not that I want you to have them. I want you to have them from me."
"That is the way I do need them, Hank. From you."
"Do you understand that it's nothing but vicious self-indulgence on my part? I'm not doing it for your pleasure, but for mine."
"Hank!" The cry was involuntary; it held amusement, despair, indignation and pity. "If you'd given me those things just for my pleasure, not yours, I would have thrown them in your face."
"Yes . . . Yes, then you would—and should."
"Did you call it your vicious self-indulgence?"
"That's what they call it."
"Oh, yes! That's what they call it. What do you call it, Hank?"
"I don't know," he said indifferently, and went on intently. "I know only that if it's vicious, then let me be damned for it but that's what I want to do more than anything else on earth."
