“Well”—he did not know how to begin, where to begin—“you see, one of the things that bothers me is that I’m not a political person either. None of us are, really, are we?” He looked to her now for support, for justification. “I mean, my generation didn’t have that kind of faith. Are we wrong, Pen, are we terribly wrong?” he asked desperately, and went on without waiting for her answer, “I have a feeling now that Cavan must have felt that nobody really cared, you know. Lately it must have been lonely to be himself, terribly lonely. The things he believed in aren’t working out, you see.”

“Did he talk about it?” Pen asked.

“No”—and then the taut look came back into George’s face—“I expect he knew I wasn’t really interested. Besides, you know how it is, I saw him in conferences—we had work to do.” Sometimes he could see thought in Pen’s face like something flowing across it, a tangible reality. “What are you thinking?”

“I don’t know,” she said, brushing her hair off her face with one hand, leaning forward so her face almost touched the beer glass, in that odd concentrated position he knew well, and found slightly irritating for he always had an impulse to say, “Sit up,” she was so curled over, stoop-shouldered, turned inward. “They seem very young sometimes——”

“They have something we haven’t got. I think maybe partly they believed in the wars they fought——”

“My father, for instance,” Pen said, going on where she had left off. This was their relationship, this meant they were in the groove, a kind of dual monologue in which they thought of things they would not have thought of alone, yet which seemed at times to have little connection with each other. “My father gets so het up, runs for office, works himself hoarse and exhausted and never gets anywhere.”

“You never told me that. I thought your father raised some queer kind of flower——”

“Oh yes, wood peonies. But he goes on periodic political binges as well. He’s a single-tax Republican—in a small Connecticut town. You can imagine!” Suddenly they were laughing. They drank their beer down soberly, but then each time they looked up and caught each other’s eye they were overcome with laughter, why they didn’t quite know, the folly of their parents’ generation, perhaps, perhaps just pleasure in having come through to this easier moment, of being safe from all the problems for a moment, safe and altogether by themselves as if they were on an island of laughter alone.

“Oh, I do love you, Pen.”

“I know, darling.…” She still had the laughter and he had lost it.

“No, you don’t know. You don’t really want to know, do you?” George asked gently.

“Talk about how young they are,” she commanded, evading him.