After that, you had presented no more letters, but they kept coming in as relentlessly as bills, and there was Pflaumen’s voice on the telephone, patient at first, then hurt and puzzled, but always mysteriously complacent. Had you gone to see the man in the Squibb Building? No? Really, it was impossible to understand you. He had been under the impression that you wanted a job. You made explanations at first, halting and shamefaced (after all, you supposed, he was trying to help you). Finally, you had quarreled with him; but your rudeness had only added to your debt, and your air of bravado and Bohemian defiance had quickened his admiration. (Such indifference to the question of survival was impractical, of course, but somehow, he knew, in awfully good taste.) You were for him, you discovered, the perfect object of charity, poor but not bedraggled, independent, stubborn, frivolous, thankless, and proud. He could pity you, deplore you, denounce you, display you, be kind to you, be hurt by you, forgive you. He could, in fact, run through his whole stock of feelings with you. A more grateful beneficiary would have given him no exercise for his masochistic emotions; a more willing one would have left his sadism unsatisfied. He was not going to let you go if he could help it. You stood to him in the relation of Man to God, embraced in an eternal neurotic mystery compounded out of His infinite goodness and your guilt.