“No,” Isabel held her hands tightly together, “I guess no one could do that.” Because, she would have liked to say, you shut out understanding by the passion of your convictions. You meet opposition to your ideas with something like hysteria always just under the surface. At the very instant of communication you slam the door shut. “Why? Why does it have to be so painful? Why are we so divided?” The words rose to her lips with compelling force; they were spoken to Fosca. “If Edward could have once talked to me about the things close to his heart without that fearful driving anger, without shutting me out—why am I talking like this?” She looked about her in a panic. She felt as if a high wall had just fallen down, the wall that had protected her, and now she was naked. She had given herself away. “I must go,” she said, getting up as if actually to run away. She was beginning to feel the tensions which Edward had felt so terribly, in herself, and she knew that she was very tired, tired and with no peace to rest in, no final resolution of anything, only the everlasting questions which devoured the faces around her, as well as her own.

They were all standing now. They were closing in on her, the enemy, the intellectuals, Edward’s friends. “I must go,” she said again.

Then she felt the gentle pressure of an arm around her shoulders, a most extraordinary sensation as if some strong fraternal emotion actually penetrated through her dress, through her skin, through her veins and reached her heart, as if the old man standing beside her could transfuse love like blood itself. “No, dear Isabel,” he said very gently, “you must stay a few moments. You can’t leave now.” Very gently he drew her over to the sofa and sat down beside her. Julia sat down on the floor in front of the fire. “He shut us all out, Isabel,” she said after a moment. “Oh, he was just a living wound at the end. If you’d seen him as I did——”

“But surely there’s something”—Isabel searched for a way to say it—“unnatural in that. I mean, he was a sick man surely.”

“We’re all sick,” Damon broke in almost angrily. “Edward watched his friends making what seemed to him fatal compromises—fear creeping in, confusion at the center, the best energies dispersed from within by doubt and anxiety. It’s hard to go back on things you’ve believed and fought for all your life. Edward couldn’t. Are we right? Was he wrong? We live in the dark, Mrs. Ferrier, at best.”

“You liberals may. Edward didn’t,” Grace said acidly.