Cavan stood under the garish electric lights, peering out like some animal caught unaware, and blinked a smile. But it was not a real smile.

“Just hanging around.” Warren House was not so cozy that anyone would choose it to hang around in for no purpose. “I dropped in,” he explained, ridiculously embarrassed now, “and then sort of got suspended on Ridley’s oral.”

“You know him?”

“Slightly.”

“Well,” Cavan said curtly, “come out and have a cup of coffee.” Dazed by the simplicity of this moment which he had planned and rehearsed so many times, and which had just happened when all seemed lost, George followed Edward Cavan out without a word. They walked down Massachusetts Avenue past the men’s clothing stores, tobacconists and banks, none of which Cavan noticed. He seemed compressed, hardly aware of the boy who walked beside him. “Hideous mess,” he muttered to himself once, nodding to a passing student. They were held up at the Square by a red light, and again George had the image of a small compact animal always on guard, or a prize fighter at ease but ready for a blow. Why was this?

“Where shall we go?” Cavan said, as if he were coming to, aware for the first time that he was not alone.

“St. Clair’s?” George offered tentatively. This and Schrafft’s were the posh places.

“I refuse to pay fifteen cents for a cup of coffee,” Cavan said irritably, as they finally got the light and crossed over. “Albiani’s—it’s more human.”

“Well, it’s empty at this time anyway.” It was, to George’s view, dismal, a huge room full of empty tables now, at rush hour filled with high school kids and bums. It was inhabited at the moment by two old ladies, a Negro workman in overalls, and a stout elderly man eating a complete dinner in a booth.

“Sit down, I’ll get the coffee.” He wondered if they would be able to talk after all. He felt frightened.

“A clean well-lighted place,” he quoted nervously, for effect, as he brought back the tray with two cups of coffee and two jars of cream on it.

“You see some real people here,” Cavan said quite seriously.

This George recognized as completely in character, this nostalgia of the intellectual for the workingman. He recognized it, but it seemed to him rather childish. The coffee was poor, and all he himself felt here was loneliness.

“That silly fool let himself get baited by Goldberg,” Cavan was saying, “lost his head. It was quite unnecessary—Ridley knows the sort of thing Goldberg is after perfectly well.”

“Goldberg has everyone scared to death,” George confided.