I have gone at that paragraph from every direction for three years and I have arrived at two things and they do not reconcile and I have stopped trying to make them.

The first is that it is an extraordinarily precise piece of self-knowledge.

He did not say he had been afraid I would say no.

He said he had been afraid of the interval.

Of the twenty or thirty seconds in which a person looks at you and adds you up.

I know that interval.

Everybody knows that interval.

It is the worst thing in the world and most people only have to stand in it three or four times in a life.