However, Peggy had no choice in her pregnancy, which is the shameful secret she's had to hide. An affair at the office, not as much shame would be attached, although that is also a secret.

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Ah, but in the early '60s Peggy would be defined by her out-of-wedlock pregnancy, if it became known.

Don wouldn't be defined by desertion (after all, his mother died) but by his mother's shameful profession, that of prostitute.

Each of which would be so shameful in the 1950s and early '60s as to make them practically pariahs.

I’m talking about the instincts which most people living a normal life don’t need to develop.

What I am saying is that watching this guy improbably pulling out of disaster after disaster, at the last minute, is possibly one of the most interesting aspects of this series.

That’s all. No need to overthink it, it’s just an opinion. And I didn’t see your former reference to this aspect until after I posted. I’m new, remember?

That being said, by the time Don confronted Pete, he had thought it through a bit. He was made to realize fleeing was not practical. His encounter with a crying Peggy in his office reminds him how much he dislikes the arrogant, privilege-fueled behavior of Pete. The final part, iirc, is that it re-occurs to him that Pete's behavior was likely to make him the loser in an exercise of raw office politics. Don was not sure he would win in Cooper's office (hence the nervous cigarette smoking there), but had at least realized this was his best option.

@judybrown: "It’s the old cliche of sales, Don is selling himself as much as any product."

Exactly. Just as he tells Peggy during the airline campaign pitch, "You are the product." He leads people to believe what he wants them to about himself in the same way he does with cigarettes or pantyhose or steel. All of his product pitches are stories, and they're almost as elaborate as the story Dick Whitman has made up about a man called Don Draper.

That statement can only be made by someone who has very much thought it through. For a long time, chronically, in every which way.

I don't buy it. The line applied ironically to Don (about his entire fake existence) as much as it did to Pete at that moment.

Season 1 showed us how precariously Don's existence remains at every moment, from having to hide from his brother on the train delivering his "corpse" post-Korea to the way he pitches a fit, trying to get Rachel to flee with him when Pete's on to him.

One of the most telling moments is the way he practically shits himself when bothered on the work train, "Dick? Dick Whitman?" His existence is so fragile that being reminded of who he is in a place where it doesn't matter by someone he'll never see again lingers with him all the way to work.

His life is a haunted by a perpetual Damocles's Sword and he knows it.

How was he to know it would turn on him, like the magic brooms in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice?

Well, the brooms do look phallic…