Runaway

supper, or letters to write, and she would leave Grace on her own in the big, cool, shaded living-dining room, with its permanently dented leather sofa and crowded bookshelves.
    “Read anything that takes your fancy,” Mrs. Travers said. “Or curl up and go to sleep if that’s what you’d like. It’s a hard job, you must be tired. I’ll make sure you’re back on time.”
    Grace never slept. She read. She barely moved, and below her shorts her bare legs became sweaty and stuck to the leather. Perhaps it was because of the intense pleasure of reading. Quite often she saw nothing of Mrs. Travers until it was time for her to be driven back to work.
    Mrs. Travers would not start any sort of conversation until enough time had passed for Grace’s thoughts to have got loose from whatever book she had been in. Then she might mention having read it herself, and say what she had thought of it—but always in a way that was both thoughtful and lighthearted. For instance she said, about
Anna Karenina,
“I don’t know how many times I’ve read it, but I know that first I identified with Kitty, and then it was Anna—oh, it was awful, with Anna, and now, you know, the last time I found myself sympathizing all the time with Dolly. Dolly when she goes to the country, you know, with all those children, and she has to figure out how to do the washing, there’s the problem about the washtubs—I suppose that’s just how your sympathies change as you get older. Passion gets pushed behind the washtubs. Don’t pay any attention to me, anyway. You don’t, do you?”
    “I don’t know if I pay much attention to anybody.” Grace was surprised at herself and wondered if she sounded conceited or juvenile. “But I like listening to you talk.”
    Mrs. Travers laughed. “I like listening to myself.”
    Somehow, around this time, Maury had begun to talk about their being married. This would not happen for quite a while— not until after he was qualified and working as an engineer—but he spoke of it as of something that she as well as he must be taking for granted.
When we are married,
he would say, and instead of questioning or contradicting him, Grace would listen curiously.
    When they were married they would have a place on Little Sabot Lake. Not too close to his parents, not too far away. It would be just a summer place, of course. The rest of the time they would live wherever his work as an engineer should take them. That might be anywhere—Peru, Iraq, the Northwest Territories. Grace was delighted by the idea of such travels— rather more than she was delighted by the idea of what he spoke of, with a severe pride, as
our own home.
None of this seemed at all real to her, but then, the idea of helping her uncle, of taking on the life of a chair caner, in the town and the very house where she had grown up, had never seemed real either.
    Maury kept asking her what she had told her aunt and uncle about him, when she was going to take him home to meet them. Even his easy use of that word—
home
—seemed slightly off kilter to her, though surely it was one she herself had used. It seemed more fitting to say
my aunt and uncle’s house.
    In fact she had said nothing in her brief weekly letters, except to mention that she was “going out with a boy who works around here for the summer.” She might have given the impression that he worked at the hotel.
    It wasn’t as if she had never thought of getting married. That possibility—half a certainty—had been in her thoughts, along with the life of caning chairs. In spite of the fact that nobody had ever courted her, she had thought that it would happen, someday, and in exactly this way, with the man making up his mind immediately. He would see her—perhaps he would have brought a chair to be fixed—and seeing her, he would fall in love. He would be handsome, like Maury. Passionate, like Maury. Pleasurable physical intimacies would follow.
    This was the thing that had not happened. In Maury’s car, or out on the grass under the stars, she was willing. And Maury was ready, but not willing. He felt it his responsibility to protect her. And the ease with which she offered herself threw him off balance. He sensed, perhaps, that it was cold. A deliberate offering which he could not understand and which did not fit in at all with his notions of her. She herself did not understand how cold she was—she believed that her show of eagerness must be leading to the pleasures she knew