Isabel drank two cups of coffee, but found that she couldn’t eat. Her bed was strewn with newspapers, and she kept picking them up one after another and rereading these words of grief, anger, recrimination, each one of which was a blow, none of which seemed real, seemed to have anything to do with the boy she had remembered so vividly last night, standing at the window of his room, hating himself. The Edward Cavan whose name blazed across the front pages was someone else, someone more important than she could have guessed, someone around whom a whirlpool of conjecture and recrimination now raged. Boxed on the front page of the Times there was a letter, for instance, from a well-known writer to the effect that Cavan was a victim of the cold war, a martyr whose act of despair laid a new burden of responsibility on all men of good will; but in a long column in a Boston newspaper a sports writer devoted a whole column to a kind of jeering and rejoicing, as if an enemy had fallen, and went so far as to accuse Edward of being a coward. Isabel herself felt nothing now but confusion, shame and, worst of all, exposure. How would she ever dare go out, go down the stairs and meet all the eyes? Her quiet talk with the Phillipses had been nothing but a short reprieve, an illusion that kindness would smooth over and make possible these terrible days, and above all that the whole business was a private matter. Now she had to recognize that far more than private feelings clustered round Edward. Already, only forty hours or so after his death, he had ceased to be human, was being made into an effigy, like a stuffed straw man held up before crowds to be cheered or jeered; he, the person, had already been snatched away and transformed to fit people’s prejudices and passions, a symbol, she supposed intellectual people might call him. But what was he to be for her now? How would she cope? How find her way? How meet it all? The whole world was her enemy this morning, waiting to pounce and demand of her some answer, some stand. But she had no answer at all, she did not know what she believed about Edward now. Oh, if only Henry were here, she thought—and then cringed. Henry would be meeting the world at home, would be reading the same headlines, or others like them. Even he would be dragged down into the whirlpool, he and the children. No one she loved was safe.