Runaway

could come up with a host of questions.
    All the clocks below—or most of them—began to chime the hour. It was already seven o’clock.
    “Is there any later train?” he called from the kitchen.
    “Yes. At five to ten.”
    “Will that be all right? Will anybody worry about you?”
    She said no. Joanne would be displeased, but you could not exactly call that being worried.
    Supper was a stew or thick soup, served in a bowl, with bread and red wine.
    “Stroganoff,” he said. “I hope you like it.”
    “It’s delicious,” she said truthfully. She was not so sure about the wine—she would have liked it sweeter. “Is this what you eat in Montenegro?”
    “Not exactly. Montenegrin food is not very good. We are not famous for our food.”
    So then it was surely all right to say, “What are you famous for?”
    “What are you?”
    “Canadian.”
    “No. What are you famous for?”
    That vexed her, she felt stupid. Yet she laughed.
    “I don’t know. I guess nothing.”
    “What Montenegrins are famous for is yelling and screaming and fighting. They’re like Juno. They need discipline.”
    He got up to put on some music. He did not ask what she wanted to hear, and that was a relief. She did not want to be asked which composers she preferred, when the only two she could think of were Mozart and Beethoven and she was not sure she could tell their work apart. She really liked folk music, but she thought he might find that preference tiresome and condescending, linking it up to some idea she had of Montenegro.
    He put on a kind of jazz.
    Robin had never had a lover, or even a boyfriend. How had this happened, or not happened? She did not know. There was Joanne, of course, but there were other girls, similarly burdened, who had managed. A reason might have been that she had not given the matter enough attention, soon enough. In the town she lived in, most girls were seriously attached to somebody before they finished high school, and some didn’t finish high school, but dropped out to get married. The girls of the better class, of course—the few girls whose parents could afford to send them to college—were expected to detach themselves from any high school boyfriend before going off to look for better prospects. The discarded boys were soon snapped up, and the girls who had not moved quickly enough then found themselves with slim pickings. Beyond a certain age, any new man who arrived was apt to come equipped with a wife.
    But Robin had had her opportunity. She had gone away to train to be a nurse, which should have given her a fresh start. Girls who trained to be nurses got a chance at doctors. There too, she had failed. She didn’t realize it at the time. She was too serious, maybe that was the problem. Too serious about something like
King Lear
and not about making use of dances and tennis games. A certain kind of seriousness in a girl could cancel out looks. But it was hard to think of a single case in which she envied any other girl the man she had got. In fact she couldn’t yet think of anybody she wished she had married.
    Not that she was against marriage altogether. She was just waiting, as if she was a girl of fifteen, and it was only now and then that she was brought up against her true situation. Occasionally one of the women she worked with would arrange for her to meet somebody, and then she would be shocked at the prospect that had been considered suitable. And recently even Willard had frightened her, by making a joke about how he should move in someday, and help her look after Joanne.
    Some people were already excusing her, even praising her, taking it for granted that she had planned from the beginning to devote her life to Joanne.
    When they had finished eating he asked her if she would like to take a walk along the river before she caught her train. She agreed, and he said that they could not do that unless he knew her name.
    “I might want to introduce you,” he said.
    She told him.
    “Robin like the bird?”
    “Like Robin Redbreast,” she said, as she had often said before, without thinking about it. Now she was so embarrassed that all she could do was go on speaking recklessly.
    “It’s your turn now to tell me yours.”
    His name was Daniel. “Danilo. But Daniel here.”
    “So here is here,” she said, still in this saucy tone which was the result of embarrassment at Robin Redbreast. “But where is there? In Montenegro—do you live in a town or the country?”
    “I