"He handed her into the taxi as though she were a package marked glass – something, she thought, not merely troublesomely womanly, but ladylike. 'Put your legs up on the seat,' he said. 'I don’t want to, Miles.' Goodbye Missis Butter Put your legs up on the seat. I don’t want to – better luck next time Missis Butter Put your legs I can’t make out our window, Missis Butter Put your 'All right, it will be nice and uncomfortable.' (She put her legs up on the seat.) Goodbye Missis But . . . 'Nothing I say is right,' he said. 'It’s good with the legs up,' she said brightly.
Then he was up the steps agile and sure after the fruit. And down again, the basket swinging with affected carelessness, arming him, till he relinquished it modestly to her outstretched hands. Then he seated himself on the little seat, the better to watch his woman and his woman’s fruit; and screwing his head round on his neck said irritably to the man who had been all his life on the wrong side of the glass pane: 'Charles Street!'"
Tess Slesinger: from The Unpossessed (1934) (reissued in 2002 by New York Review Books)
