She felt as they walked into the Yard through the high ironwork gates that they were entering a secret world. For one thing there was no traffic here, except human beings on their feet. As they crossed the Square on the way she had been utterly bewildered by the cars, the people moving between the cars, the hectic air it all had. Here inside the Yard, it was as if a quiet hand were laid upon them. Gardeners were busy raking leaves off the grass. Students sat under the trees and on the steps of the library in little knots or alone. Goldberg stopped for a moment at the seated statue of John Harvard, then again to point out the sharp clean thrust of the chapel spire. As he talked about these things, he became a different person; he seemed ten years younger. And the tension of their talk in the dark restaurant had in some way relaxed; for the first time since she had arrived the night before, Isabel felt she could breathe freely. But it was only when he had led her into the Houghton Library and they leaned in that dustless atmosphere, so silent it seemed almost deathly, over glass-topped tables under which Keats’s own handwriting lay, that she turned to her companion confidently and felt able to ask the real question.

“But what good is it,” she asked as if she had picked up a remark of his where it lay between them, “to be involved in what you call the agony of the times, as Edward was, if you come to the wrong conclusions? How can you be wrong and right at the same time? You say that you cannot agree with his political point of view and you say at the same time that you and I are less than he was——”

“Don’t lean too hard on that glass. It might break,” he said in a whisper. “Come out,” he said, “let’s sit on the steps of the library and smoke a cigarette.” For Ivan Goldberg this was a most extraordinary concession, but Isabel did not know that. She was only glad and a little dazed and very much in awe of the environment. The steps sounded less formidable than the hushed embalmed room. People would not stare at her as if she were a queer animal strayed into the academic grove.

Climbing the shallow steps, to a place where they could lean against the wall and be in the sun, Isabel wondered why she had thought of Professor Goldberg as a devil. He offered her a cigarette, lit it, and looked up, blinking myopically at the chapel spire just across from them. It soared above the Yard and the trees and all the people like some continual signal, she thought.

“I’ve never done this before,” he announced as if it were a confession. “I’ve never quite dared.”

“It takes a stranger to make you dare?”