Talking spontaneously, about unprepared topics, seems different. The experience of interviewing Warren these days is distinct from seeing her either on the stage, where she is secure in her message, or with staff in the greenroom, where she gives herself over to the wacky wound-up whimsy that Saturday Night Live has shorthanded as “Mom-hosting-Thanksgiving energy.” In our interview she speaks very slowly, with a lot of thoughtful pauses; more than once, I have the impression that she is talking to me as if working at a typewriter, envisioning the sentence on this page while weaving it aloud. Her circumspection can seem extreme. At one point, I ask her what she’s been reading. “I read lots of fiction,” she says but won’t elaborate. I ask whether her prospective status as the first female president will figure more prominently in the general election. “I don’t know,” she says meditatively, and begins talking about the climate and student-loan debt.

You learn something from a candidate who leaps out of the way of hard-pitched questions; you learn something slightly different from someone who steps back from the softer pitches, too. Warren’s almost stubborn refusal to venture a lateral step on the fly grew plain in the October debate, when Buttigieg pressed her for information about the financial details of her health-care platform. In the moment, Warren held to her lines, and she suffered for it. Then, two weeks later, she came out with full details of her plan.

THIS SLOW, careful accrual of solid material has become the backbone of her presidential bid. Buttigieg’s highly strategic campaign can seem to adjust the candidate’s affect at each inflection point—conciliator here, attack dog there—as if fiddling with the contrast knob on a TV. Sanders’s campaign seems to operate from an ideological understanding of big social forces; Biden’s continuity campaign bears forward tried-and-true ideas. Among the front-runners, Warren is the only woman, the only field researcher, and the only candidate who had not launched a political career by 30. Each of these facts leaves a trace.

I ask Warren when she realized that she wanted a different kind of life from the one she’d had in childhood—one doesn’t, after all, go from a struggling family in Oklahoma to a high perch at Harvard and a New England senatorship by accident. “As a young woman I wanted what I’d been taught to want, and I tried really hard to succeed at that,” she says. “I just wasn’t cut out to stay home and build my life around my husband. I understood that many women did, and for a long time I felt like a failure.” Instead, she says, she kept trying to supplement her life. “With each one of those steps, I built a more independent life—not purposefully to take me away from the vision of marriage I’d grown up with, but because I needed to do more.” Her project can seem like a giant ball of yarn, gathering strands over decades as it rolls through the world.

At the center of the ball is Warren the woman—“a fighter,” she likes to say, but evidently not the kind who darts and feints. I ask her outright how she thinks her careful, slow-growing, super-planner nature squares with the flashes of wild spontaneity that sometimes break through: the part of her that seems to love improvising among selfie-seekers; the part that, as a working mother, proposed marriage to a man who lived eight states away.

“What an interesting question!” she says, and sits in uncharacteristic stillness. “To plan,” she begins slowly, “helps me make sure that I’m headed in the right direction, and that I know what the eventual goal is. But at every moment along the way, I’m open to any new piece of information, or new idea, that could either improve on the plan or take me”—she smiles—“to an even better place.”