That was the turning point in the evening. Pretty soon Morris took both me and Emily home in a cab, and they set me up nicely on the couch, and they did not make too much noise in Morris’s room, which was considerate, and in the morning they made me eggs, and I sight-translated some passages from Babel’s story “Guy de Maupassant,” about a young man, like me a little, who helps a rich man’s beautiful wife translate some stories by Maupassant and then seduces her. I had not seduced anyone, but I had seen something, or I had begun to see something, there was a glimmer that I saw, of how things worked—and that was what the story was about. I explained this to Morris and Emily, though leaving myself out of it, of course, and they were pleased, Emily especially. “Keith’s a lot smarter than I was when I was twenty,” she said. It had turned out that Emily was closer to thirty than to twenty. “Is he smarter than you were, Morris?”