A man and a woman wait at a Spanish train station, drinking beer and talking around a decision they cannot name. Hemingway never uses the word 'abortion,' but the story is about nothing else. The dialogue is stripped of context; the reader must infer everything from what is not said. The hills across the valley look like white elephants: the simile is obscure, suggestive, never explained. The story is three pages of omission. Hemingway called his method the iceberg theory: the dignity of movement comes from what is beneath the surface. This story is all surface, all depths.