Most nights Ralph could stand it. But some nights he couldn’t. On those nights he lay suffocating beneath the weight of the lust he imagined around him, the desires rewarded, the unspoken physical kindnesses that can occur in the dark even between people who loathe the sight of each other by daylight.

In every house, he thought with fascination, there is a different life. There is sex in every bed. He walked the streets of his town every day, seeing on every face the simple charities they had afforded one another in the dark, and he told himself that he alone among them did not need that in order to go on.

He went to their weddings and their funerals. He adjudicated their quarrels, bore their tirades. He hired them and fired them, and he never lost the picture of them groping their way through the mute darkness, hunting and finding comfort, so that when the sun came up, they could go on with their lives.

That morning, in the mirror, he had seen his face, and it was a face he didn’t want to be seen. His hunger, his rapacious solitude-they were not dead. And these people around him were not blind. They must have been, all these years, as horrified as he had been that morning.

In his pocket was the letter, and in the letter was a picture of a plain woman whom he did not know, ordered like a pair of boots from Chicago, and in that picture was Ralph’s whole future, and nothing else mattered. Even his shame, as he stood in the gawking crowd, waiting for an overdue train, was secondary to that, because he had set his heart on a course before he had the first idea of what the course would bring him, and because he could not, under their darting eyes, avert his gaze or turn his intention from what he had decided with his whole heart, long before he had known what it meant.