She lit a cigarette and handed it to him. The thing was that the coming event had made them all tense, nervous, too aware of all that had happened, lifted out of the day-to-day scramble by this high tension hour.

“What time is it?” Grace asked. She had not been listening. She had been thinking about Edward who had been spared this at least. It was a long time since she had thought about him so vividly. It was a long time since she had cried out, “Edward, Edward,” in her sleep, waking over and over again in the dark, frightened by her own voice. It was as if Edward as a presence had been swallowed up. Only sometimes late in the evening at a dinner party, perhaps, when the guard was down, his name might be mentioned. He was spoken of then as a wounded man, with just that shade of smugness which the healthy feel for the ill. Only Orlando Fosca had never used this tone, perhaps because he alone felt no guilt. But the others pushed the thought of Edward away, just as she, sitting in the car, pushed it away from her now. “Of course you’ll get the fellowship,” she said, patting George’s knee rather roughly.

It was just as well that they had come early. Already, a half hour before the doors were to open, there was quite a crowd gathered outside the courthouse. Grace, lifting her head a little, so she could see, drank in the smoke of battle and felt excited. It was a curious group. She recognized members of a militant Catholic organization; there were shabby old women; there were students; there was Goldberg to whom she nodded. She tried to read the faces, to separate those who had come to see “the Reds” baited from those who had come on the side of the accused, to show where they stood, to be heard if possible. But there was no way of reading the faces—and it seemed strange, the secretiveness, the fact that people could show so little to each other what went on inside them, the fact that this group, patiently waiting, concealed violent passions, fear, fanatical religious zeal, hatred, love. But nothing of this showed. For the moment they were a community of people waiting, united in suspense which, for the moment, was merely physical, waiting for a door to open.