To this day he can’t look at her straight. To this day she can’t quite convince herself that the sin was as grave as it seemed. (She thought, in fact, of telling the priest as he whispered his furious admonitions that she weighed barely a hundred pounds and was as thin as a boy and if he would adjust his imagination accordingly and see the buds of her breasts and her flat stomach and the bony points of her hips, he would understand that even buck naked, her body was not made for mortal sin.)

She can’t quite convince herself, these ten years later, that anything at all like it will happen to her again.

She finished her sandwich, gave an extra quarter to the waitress, who also wore no wedding band, and headed back into the breach.

In the lobby of her building, people fresh out of the wind were huffing and puffing like swimmers just crawled up on shore. She rode the elevator with a group of them and then ducked into the ladies’ room before she headed for her desk, ten minutes over her hour.

Pauline was there already, at the desk just across the aisle, facing her typewriter but with her hands in her lap and her shoulders slumped under the good wool of her handmade dress, her big, freshly powdered face watchful and, no doubt, full of news. “Nice lunch?” Pauline asked, batting her eyes at the clock and flicking her tongue over her teeth, as if to indicate she had finished her own some time ago.

“Nice,” Mary said and bowed her head. She felt some guilt: she had not, this lunch hour, invited Pauline along.

She uncovered her own typewriter, feeling Pauline’s eyes on her. Although their desks both faced the front of the room, their typewriters were off to the side so that Pauline’s eyes on her-on her back when she turned to type, on her profile when she turned to her desk-had become by now a condition of her employment.

“I didn’t see you leave,” Pauline said. “I just got a sandwich and brought it back here.”