A week earlier in that October of 1949 George Hastings in his rooms in Kirkland House at Harvard flung down his pencil and stood up to stretch. He went over to the window and looked up at the bright blue sky, then across the courtyard at the white cornices and sills of the windows and the red brick glowing in the late afternoon sunlight. There was no one around except a gardener raking the leaves. Somewhere far off a bell tolled the hour. I’ve got it in my hands, he thought, and excitement flashed through him like a wave of physical desire. He went to the desk and read over once more the headings of the ten chapters of his doctor’s thesis; there it was, then, at last. All the minute detail he had been buried in for months, the endless cards which had so long been a barrier between him and what he really wanted to say had focused in the last twenty-four hours. He had been able to encompass and synthesize all the little parts like the parts of a complicated machine, and now the machine was purring and alive. Just a single sheet of paper, but it was magic, he thought. It was a book. Looking at it again, his heart thumped inside him like a big animal. This was the thing no one could talk about, but that he supposed they all felt once in a while, like an athlete when he secretly breaks his own record, when he knows what he’s got. And what people may say afterwards, and whether he can ever do it again, doesn’t really matter.