and for an hour or two they talked in circles. - Richard Yates

"It took me a long time to figure out... that the best way to handle [the couple's dialogue] was to have them nearly always miss each other's points, to have them talk around and through and at each other. There's a great deal of dialogue between them in the finished book... but there's almost no communication." In other words Yates had remembered the lesson of his first great master, Fitzgerald—namely, that people rarely say what they mean, and good dialogue is a matter of catching one's characters "in the very act of giving themselves away".

And he didn't mind at all. Downstairs and outdoors and alone again, back in the trampled dust in front of the place, he pitied the drab supervisor and all her quick, harried, frowning children because none of them looked as though they had anything worth waiting for, tonight or ever.

And he was afraid she might be taking this much too seriously, so he reached out to stroke or tousle her hair, but that didn't work because she'd just been to the hairdresser and didn't want to get it messed up.