Dexter cracked the car window and let the winter wind rake his face. An intelligent person sat beside him, a girl who was not silly, who would understand whatever he gave her to understand, who intrigued him through some combination of physical attributes and mental toughness, but really it was the latter, because physical attributes surrounded him daily and prompted little feeling. And yet there was a problem with the girl in his car—this smart, modern girl with correct values, joined to the war effort, a girl matured by hard times and familial tragedy—and that problem was that all he could think of doing, in a concrete way, was fucking her. The rest—vague notions that she might work for him, that her toughness could be of use, that she was likely a good shot (taut slender arms, visible in the dress she was wearing tonight); confusion about how they had originally met (had someone introduced them?)—flickered at a middle distance, well behind his need to have her. And even as that need made it hard to drive the goddamn car, he was also thinking: this was the problem of men and women, what made the professional harmony he envisaged so difficult to achieve. Men ran the world, and they wanted to fuck the women. Men said “Girls are weak” when in fact girls made them weak. At the same time, another line of thought was unspooling: Why this? Why now? Why her? Why take the risk when George Porter had just seen them? But those questions were theoretical, to be debated at some future point. For now, the explosive discontent that had been mounting in Dexter since his visit to Mr. Q. two weeks before had at last found an object. And another line of thinking: Where could they go? Somewhere private, somewhere indoors. Lust made an idiot of everyone it touched—Dexter felt stupidity shrouding his head like a hood in the shape of a dunce’s cap. Where? Where? Where?

She waited by the door while he checked his pockets. Now that they were two people in coats and hats, she felt calmer. When he joined her at the door, she smiled up at him, relieved. He held her chin in his fingers and gave her a perfunctory kiss—a kiss goodbye—before unbolting the door. Then he kissed her again, more deeply, and Anna felt a window fall open inside her despite everything—a wish to start again, even with sunrise approaching. The hunger he’d wakened in her banished every scruple—she would think about them later. And reentering the dream made her shame of minutes ago melt away.