“I’ll see that you get a real chance, I’ll do all I can,” Cavan had said months ago, hinting at a possible instructorship for the following year. Then he had stopped, sat down, played with a pencil and added in a curiously abrupt, embarrassed way, “Of course it’s not entirely in my hands, you know. These things are department matters. I sometimes think I have become an outsider.” He had looked up at George with a hesitant smile, seemed to want to say more, instead changed the subject. It was George’s first glimpse of the fact that even the great felt insecure, that even they were caught up in the matrix of ambitions, even they were vulnerable. Since then he had heard enough gossip and rumor to be quite aware that Cavan was considered a maverick in some quarters, not entirely sound for political reasons. It had done him no good to stand up and fight on every liberal issue for the last ten years. “But after all,” George had answered hotly when this came up in a bull session, “his work is absolutely first-rate. You can’t deny that.”

“All I know is they get letters of complaint from old grads; people talk, you know, and it doesn’t do the college any good.”

“It doesn’t do the college any good to be full of second-rate pussyfooters either.” George had been furiously angry, the more so because he was not interested in politics and felt slightly bewildered himself by this side of Cavan.

“Hi, George.” Jack Warner almost bumped into him, on purpose it seemed. “What’s eating you?”

“Why?”

“You look like a bat out of hell—what’s the rush?”

“I have an appointment,” George said stiffly and walked on. It was a stupid thing to say, and out of sheer exasperation George broke into a run. He rounded the corner past the Union and jumped the three steps of the Warren House porch as if he were bringing the message to Garcia. Then, inside, he was greeted by silence and the dead bulletin board, every item of which he must have read a hundred times. Was it all over? The whole place had a dank academic smell as if the students sweating out their fears had infected it; how many of them had waited here, as he was waiting, smoking because there was nothing else to do, reading over and over the announcements of fellowships and lectures, trying to think up a new excuse for a late paper?