He was observing her now and, troubled by the question in his look, she found herself filling in rather rapidly, setting up a screen of words, as she launched into a description of the casket company where she had just been, the hushed atmosphere, the smoothness with which she had been persuaded into the most expensive possible bronze object, against her better judgment. She told it half humorously but something in his response froze the words on her lips. He was looking out through his face, his mask, she suddenly felt. He was trying to say something.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I don’t know quite what to say—I feel so inadequate. Something is expected of me. What”—she attacked out of sheer panic—“for instance do you expect of me?”

Professor Goldberg offered her a cigarette and lit one for himself; the question lay in the air between them for some seconds.

“It’s more, I think, what I expect of myself, Mrs. Ferrier.”

“I don’t quite understand.”

“I was bold to ask for your time today. I suppose I am not quite myself. None of us is. We are victims of shock. You meet us under strange circumstances, Mrs. Ferrier.” The speech was labored, so much so, that—did she dream it?—it was as if he were making a physical effort and his breath came hard.

“But at least,” she said quietly, “you knew Edward. I didn’t. When I read the papers this morning, I——”

She saw his left hand clench into a fist and rap the table twice. His face flushed over. “It’s disgraceful. A travesty,” he said between his teeth. “It will have to stop.”

“How can it stop?”

Just then the waitress appeared with a bottle wrapped in a napkin and poured out two glasses of wine. However angry he may have been, Ivan Goldberg tasted it very gravely, pronounced it adequate and then leaned forward, glaring at her as if she were not there, to say, “It’s like a terrible machine that has been set in motion—passion, doubt, guilt. We’re all caught in the machine,” he said, almost as if he accused her.

“No one has told me why he did it,” Isabel said, as if to deflect the pressure a fraction.

“He didn’t know himself,” Ivan’s answer came quickly. It was as if he were holding back torrents of words. Would they spill out? Would she have to withstand them? Isabel began to eat bread and butter nervously. She wondered if people could hear what they were saying, wondered whether other people were talking about the same thing. For a second it seemed to her that the room was full of conspirators, heads bent together, avid eager faces, those across the way for instance. “People who commit suicide do not do it for a reason—they may think so, rationalize. Your brother talked about the political tensions——”