It was thus that she loved him, when he suddenly pulled himself up short, shot out with basic conviction, putting a huge pat of butter on his roll and eating it in one mouthful, the spring of vitality in the man! She could see him swinging himself up on his own words as on a ladder—like an acrobat.

“Edward would have agreed with that,” she said warmly. “Maybe we’ve become too complicated, maybe we have to get back to such simple ideas—love, generosity—whatever the risk—”

“Could I have called him back?” Damon asked her straight out.

The question came as a shock. She had no time to prepare an answer. “Darling, I don’t know——”

“He called me a coward and a cheat—that’s what it amounted to.”

“You called him a fuzzy-minded fool—it’s poison to remember,” she went on quickly, “you were too angry, each of you to say anything worth remembering, Damon. That is the truth, and you know it is.”

“But if Edward and I could get that angry, could hurt each other that much, then what a world we live in—it’s that, Julia, the wild animals we are becoming——”

“I know.…”

“What’s left?” he said very quietly. The room lurched around them. Everything solid seemed to be dissolving, so Julia felt. Yet she clung to the little scattered pieces of truth, she tried to fit them together. She leaned back and closed her eyes. “You don’t really think Edward was right, do you?” All his self-doubt rose up in his question, and she opened her eyes to meet his across the table.

“No. I think he was wrong. How shall I say it? Rationally wrong, somehow right all the same, for himself, in himself. It’s like Grace Kimlock. It’s much easier to be that uncompromising person than to be you, Damon. It’s harder to stand in the middle and try to see clearly, to admit—we have to admit it—that we were blind to the danger of communism, that we did not want to see the truth. It’s hard to admit that. I know what it cost you to get out of the Progressive Party, even if Edward didn’t, couldn’t know it.” They had not spoken out so honestly to each other for a long time.