As Fuller read her the story about the evening’s dinner, she realized why she detested Lucy. It was because she herself believed in nature, in Fuller’s fulfilling what she now accepted as his own. She also had begun to feel, perhaps contradictorily, that Jerry and Beverly were fulfilling some aspect of their natures; marriage for them would be the cementing of something childlike and fraternal and curiously authentic. But Fuller’s union with Lucy was no civilized companionship, or even some piece of sophisticated realism; it was a corrupt bargain that the two of them had struck. Fuller thought
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