He became aware of a character’s voice in his mind, speaking the very words he was at that moment reading in a novel.  He assumed he had become one with the character, was animating it, but the voice suddenly veered off the words he was reading and intruded into his personal thoughts: Go stew in the sun on the beach, not over her one solitary word.  He recognized this as yet another instance of a character feeling free to set up home in his mind.  It was true that he was stewing over the Whatever! she threw at him just as they had stepped out of the cafe.  He had expected her to continue on, to complete the sentence, but she had pulled in her handbag and walked off.  What?, he had called to her.  Whatever!, she had hurled back again with a wave.  Was that a new form of goodbye?  He tried not to think of it or her over the succeeding days — till he found Whatever! as the first word of a novel on a library shelf.  He got it home and read on.  The woman, whom he had almost succeeded in forgetting, stormed back into mind, and started to make the pages of what turned out to be a war novel as real to him as if it were the record of what may have ensued between them had she not marched off.  He had helped start a little battle between them, so how could he then walk away from the fight to idle on the beach?  No, come whatever, he had to return and face Whatever!