Almost she looked forward to the meeting ahead, in which it seemed, she would have to go over the will with Edward’s lawyer. This would be a factual affair, a matter of signing documents. Pain, confusion, guilt—these would be formally held at bay. There would be no terrifying old lady with piercing eyes to read her thoughts, no foreign delicate old man whose clear blue eyes accused her of things she could not even imagine. Last night she had gone to bed in a state of exhaustion, wondering how these people managed to live in an atmosphere of such strain, such self-accusation, constantly worrying about responsibilities which seemed to her nebulous in the extreme. What did it matter really whether some physics professor voted for Truman or for Wallace? And why would doing either one be called treachery? She was willing to grant that Edward had been probably a wonderful professor, but wasn’t that enough? And why did they have to rub it in, insist, beat her over the head with it? It seemed to her that night that these people elevated talk into a semblance of action and mistook words for deeds. But this, as her husband often said, was the trouble with intellectuals anyway. “They build their own mazes and get lost in them,” he had said more than once, with a comfortable chuckle. How childish it all seemed to her, just as they had appeared to her like children that night at the Phillipses’, precocious children who did not know anything about life. It was another thing to perform a delicate operation on a lung, to heal the sick as Henry did. That, she felt, was real. And if these people ever went into politics and got their hands dirty, that might seem real too.

She was walking quite fast and realized that these thoughts had taken her past the huge stone door of the office building where she was bound. Now, turning, going back, retracing her steps, she retraced her thoughts until she stood still, looking up at the huge wall above her and, for some reason, was forced to remember something else—that wave of exaltation which had lifted her for a moment in the church. Well, one must be allowed such moments—that was what a funeral was for. Now, standing on the street watching a newsboy call his papers in a halfhearted way and the traffic bumper to bumper in the narrow street, here in the noise and activity of real life, she felt that Dr. Willoughby’s choice of the great passage from Donne had been an indulgence, a loving but inaccurate gesture toward Edward’s beliefs. “No man is an Iland—” But no one ever was more an island, she thought, than poor dear Edward. In his isolation from ordinary human realities he had come to fatally wrong conclusions, as far as she could see. Could this be called “greatness”? No, it was time to face the facts.