“I know what you mean. It’s like innocence. But Cavan was different—too intelligent perhaps. Why do I talk about him like this?” George broke into what he was saying, “It’s disgusting.”

“I don’t see why.”

“Everybody prying into him, trying to get underneath, trying to break it down and analyze it, something so awful he died because of it, and all we do is peer and pry—and don’t know what it was, and never will know what it was—”

He had got Pen’s real attention now and he felt it, like a rising wave of power inside him.

“Why did you love him so, George? What was it?”

“Did I love him?” George balked at the word. He was startled by it.

“Well, if you didn’t, why are you so upset?” She could be so darned logical at times, it was peculiar.

“Well for one thing,” he said in a hard voice, “he would have got me an instructorship next year, if you must know——”

“I’ve thought of that,” she said gently. “But that’s another thing. I mean your feeling about him.”

“I’m sorry. Maybe his passion for excellence, the standard he set, the breadth and depth of the standard,” he answered her now, on the rising wave. “For instance, this. Years ago when I was in a seminar. We read papers and he used to get up and stand at the window while we read them, or wander around sometimes. I read one of Thoreau’s poems and right in the middle of one poem I stopped and said, ‘God, that’s good!’ I just had to because the line struck me just at that moment. Cavan was sitting and he rapped hard on the table with his knuckles and said, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ That was all, but I’ve never forgotten it, the concentrated passion of it. That was the quality he had as a teacher, and I begin to think he had it partly because he had it about everything. I mean, would he have cared in the same way about literature if he hadn’t been involved in human affairs themselves? That’s the real question, Pen.”

“You mean we don’t care enough? We’re not, as he seems to have been, passionate people?—you mean, we’re afraid?”

“Want to play it safe, don’t stick our necks out, sit tight—all the rot about a sheltered life. Cavan as a professor at Harvard was never sheltered, never allowed himself to be.”

“And cracked up,” Pen interrupted the fine flow flatly.

“God damn it, yes, and maybe that’s better than becoming a fossil!” George had raised his voice.

“What’s eating you, George? Such profanity!” came a man’s voice from the next booth. Hoffman’s head appeared over it, assistant professor giving one of the Humanities courses. George flushed and subsided.