“We,” he used to say when they first walked together in Garfield. “We are different. We don’t like foolish chatter, frills, extravagance, display of feelings. We are thinkers.” Both he and she were different from her mother in Budapest, who lived on flatteries, who dressed extravagantly, who was always preoccupied with her emotions. They were different from his family, different from anybody he could think of because practically all other people were vain, foolish, hypocritical. “We are different,” he said. His daughter detected a tinge of sadness and irritation—as if he were questioning why this was so, troubled by the fact that they were different—which offended her pride and created a distance between them. She wanted to remain apart, to be left alone. Paternal approval gave her certain liberties: an aloof man, an aloof daughter. But he was also a father: he worried why she didn’t care for her appearance, spent all her time alone, why didn’t she have a boyfriend? Why wasn’t she like other girls?—like the grocer’s red-haired daughter showing off her breasts, she would catch a man for sure before she was seventeen; or like the reform rabbi’s daughter who was high-minded, a brilliant student—but all in the service of femininity. He cited others, sometimes he was joking; he wouldn’t seriously want her to be like the receptionist at the hospital, with her perfect manicure, hair set and doll smile, sitting there just to attract a man. And certainly not like one of his patients he was describing. He didn’t want her to be like his mother and sisters. The world had changed. He didn’t know. He really didn’t know himself what was demanded of a woman in this new and changing world; what a woman should be, and his daughter in particular. It was a question on his mind he was asking himself and his daughter. Perhaps because she took too long to answer, he went on citing cases; or perhaps it was to relieve her, or simply because he was accustomed to her silence and accustomed to answering the questions addressed to her. Occasionally she spoke, and she startled him by her answers; so perhaps to spare himself her answers he went on thinking out loud about what a woman’s life used to be and what it could be under the present circumstances—a question that he could not bring to either theoretical or practical resolution. He always concluded by returning to his daughter approvingly, praising her seriousness, her kind of beauty which was not cheap or worldly. “We are different,” he always concluded, sometimes with a touch of theatricality, fusing pathos and irony in the sweep of a gesture, putting his arm around her shoulder as they walked.