“Do I? I didn’t mean to. I’d better get us some lunch. Pour yourself another drink—I’ll only be a minute.” But am I right always to smooth things over, never to be honest with him? she asked herself, busy in the kitchen, mixing the salad. Whatever we are, we are together. If he fails, I’ve failed him. When you marry someone you become a kind of Siamese twin—a woman does, anyway. These were her thoughts as she laid the table, set out the salads, the glasses of milk, the bread and butter. But when she called Damon in, she saw at once that it had been a mistake to leave him alone. He was sitting hunched over, a cigarette burned almost down to the end in his mouth, and when he looked up at her, she instinctively lowered her eyes, made shy by the nakedness of his misery.

“Come along and have some lunch,” she said gently.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Well, come along anyway and talk to me while I eat. I’m starving.” So she lifted him, cajoled him like a sick child.

He groaned, then came and put an arm round her casually. “Precious love,” he said, “what would I do without you?” Yes, when he was down to the lowest ebb, he needed her, she thought, and as always she was stirred, she was alive with feeling for him, the instinctive reaction of a nurse to a wound. But would he ever come back to her in love when he felt well, powerful, when he had something to give?

He ate his lunch ravenously, as he talked, as it all poured out. “It was that Donne thing—I thought of how things were back there in thirty-six—Spain—Edward and I used to go out as a team and talk to church groups all over the state. Do you remember? Drive back late at night and talk. The Al Smith campaign too—the first Roosevelt campaign. Where has it all gone, Julia? God knows, there was plenty of opposition. We were a small enough minority. But it was a clean clear struggle—or seemed to be. I expect we were fooled about Spain and that was the beginning of the mess.…” He was not looking at her, but beyond her now, into his own history.

“Really only the Catholics and the Communists can be quite clear in their minds now,” she answered. “Everything in between, everything that will not take refuge in a dogma, close the windows and doors, is in jeopardy, in flux—What shall we leave the children?”

“The instinct to resist oppression, whatever form it takes,” he came back with a bounce.