“I shall succeed where he failed. But my success won’t mean anything, you see. The one person who really cared, who would have known what my book meant, won’t be there to read it. And why?” His voice thickened. Isabel knew there was real feeling here, and she respected it. She did not look at him. “Because he knew and the reason he knew was that he was what he was. Quite a few pilots got killed trying to break the sound barrier, you know—and you might call it suicide, in a way. The first tries were suicidal, actually. Edward was trying to break through a much more difficult barrier, a human barrier, to unite the intellect and life, to make man whole. The poor guy,” Goldberg said, and now the torrent of words had come. “He was so innocent that he was terribly impressed because Wallace read his books. This seemed to him a sign, a portent—it was the breaking through toward him from the other side. I see it all so clearly now,” and his voice grew hard. “But he couldn’t break through of course.”

“Why do you care then?” Isabel asked. It was amazing how, when they talked of Edward, all these people lit up.

“I don’t know. The strange thing is”—Goldberg looked at her now, really as if she were a human being—“that one can talk to you. And one couldn’t talk to Edward——”

“Because I don’t make you feel guilty”—she smiled an ironic smile—“I’m nobody’s conscience, and Edward, it seems to me, was.”

“I hated him for it. I fought him every inch of the way. I never gave in for a moment,” Goldberg said half to himself. “Only last week he came and begged me to sign a petition—and I refused.”

“And now,” she asked quickly, “will you sign it?” The question, she saw as soon as it had slipped out, was crucial, was also perhaps cruel. “I’m sorry. That’s not fair, is it?”

“No,” Goldberg pushed his plate away. “I shan’t sign it.” There was a pause while he ordered coffee and dessert, then he came back to the point. “People don’t change, Mrs. Ferrier, even under shock. That’s where your brother was beating his head against a wall. He believed that he might change, you see, that he would learn to break through. But he couldn’t, any more than I can. The only difference is that I accept certain facts and he couldn’t. In the University, for instance—and the University is my passion, Mrs. Ferrier—I am respected and feared, but I am not loved. That is a fact I have had to accept.”

It was a confession she chose to lay aside, because she had to get back to something he had said earlier. “But if Edward believed in the possibilities of change, then why did he …?”