Isabel felt she had been catapulted in the last five minutes into a world as strange as the moon. Anyone could tell that Mr. Phillips was a professor. He seemed in fact like a caricature of one, his thin uncombed hair falling down over his forehead, his face all broken up by lines, his air of agitated incompetence. Henry would have a fit if he imagined she was being driven by a man who stripped the gears every time he changed speed and turned right round in his seat every few minutes to look behind him. But she was not nervous. She was too excited, peering out into the strangeness, a limbo of factories with glimpses of water seen through neon signs, and even once a ship tied up apparently in the middle of a city block.

It was really too queer to be here, driving along through the night with two perfect strangers, uprooted from everything familiar—the plane had become a kind of refuge in the last hours—but here she was nowhere. She wondered if she would ever get back to Henry, he seemed so far away in the sunlight where everything was natural and good.

They had just crossed an immensely high bridge and now swung out onto the water’s edge. Damon turned round continually to point out things to her, continually admonished by his wife to pay attention to the road, and for a while Isabel had no time to think. “That’s Boston over there?” she asked, amazed that it could look so brilliant, reflected lights in the river, all shining and beautiful like a city in a dream. But then that too was gone and quite suddenly Damon was swerving into a driveway, grating to a stop, and they had arrived.

“We thought we’d bring you here for a nightcap, so it wouldn’t feel too strange, but you’ll sleep at the hotel just around the corner. We thought you might rather not be a guest, feel quite free,” Julia was saying as they walked up the steps of the porch.