She had thought she would not know him, not until he was the last man left, but of course she did. His was the unrequited face, his the disconnection from the eddying sea of people around him. She knew him at once. He looked so rich and so alone.

All of a sudden, she was afraid. It had never occurred to her that they would have to talk; they would say hello, of course, but she hadn’t gotten much farther than that. Now it seemed to stretch into infinity, the endless small talk she imagined as the daily life of married people, the details, the getting and grabbing, the parrying and accommodating, the doing of whatever it was that married people did.

Because she would marry him, of course. She had said she would and she would. But then what? How to fill the days, the endless round of meals, of chores, the endless hours in this brilliant blindness which seemed to suck out of her all possibility of speech.

The beginnings were so enchanting usually, and yet she could only stand in frozen dread at all the small complacencies that filled the middle. If she got sick, he would nurse her, she supposed. They would discuss the price of things. He would be tight with money, although he looked expensively dressed. She would ask him for money and he would give it and then she would pay for the things they needed, and then she would tell him what she had bought. They would discuss that at dinner, food she had made for him. They would discuss the weather, noting every change, or read together in the long howling evenings, by some fire or stove. She supposed they would do or say whatever it was people in their situation normally did and said but she realized now she didn’t know what that was.

In the train car, on the slow ride from Chicago, the edges of things were clear and everything stood out in sharp focus. Here in the snow, in the sharp weather, everything blurred, the edges disappeared leaving only vague unknowable shapes, and she was afraid.