(…) “Once or twice every night, serving dinner at the big round table, Enid glanced over her shoulder and caught him looking, and made him blush. Al was Kansan. After two months he found courage to take her skating. They drank cocoa and he told her that human beings were born to suffer. He took her to a steel-company Christmas party and told her that the intelligent were doomed to be tormented by the stupid. He was a good dancer and a good earner, however, and she kissed him in the elevator. Soon they were engaged and they chastely rode a night train to McCook, Nebraska, to visit his aged parents. His father kept a slave whom he was married to.
(…)
What to believe about Al Lambert? There were the old-man thins he said about himself and the young-man way he looked. Enid had chosen to believe the promise of his looks. Life then became a matter of waiting for his personality to change.
    While she waited, she ironed twenty shirts a week, plus her own skirts and blouses.
    Nosed in around the buttons with the iron’s tip. Flattened the wrinkles, worked out the kinks.
    Her life would have been easier if she hadn’t loved him so much, but she couldn’t help loving him. Just to look at him was to love him.” (…)