Jones, the super, watches Lutie walk up the street to the bar and burns with desire. Not only is Lutie beautiful and young, but “she made [Jones] more aware of the deadly loneliness that ate into him day and night” (86). Jones reminisces about his romantic history, about the loneliness he felt while first working on ships, a feeling that would drive him “half-mad with a frenzied kind of hunger” (86) when he’d go ashore. After that, he had another lonely stint as a night watchman, until finally finding work as a super, so that “there would be people around him all the time” (86). 

However, the tenants don’t pay Jones much attention and he now has trouble attracting young women, so he spends most of his time outside, “looking at the women who went past, estimating them, wanting them” (87). He’s focused all his desire on Lutie, wanting her “worse than he had ever wanted anything in his life” (87). 

He decides to befriend Bub in order to get closer to Lutie, even though he “hated the child with a depth of emotion that set him trembling” (88) because Bub reminds Jones of the man who had had Lutie before Jones met her.