Grace Kimlock, daughter of a beloved Harvard dean, considered herself a kind of emeritus dean herself, now that she was in her seventies. It was certainly true that she had a gift for bringing members of the faculty together and getting them to talk, as she put it, “about the facts.” What this really meant, of course, was “the feelings”; she dearly loved a row, the chance to watch two enemies fight it out in the open. The passive, the indifferent, or those with little life to spare were frightened off; she needed resilience to strike her flint against. Weakness of any sort upset her and she reacted, quite unconsciously, by being cruel. It was in the order of things that she and Edward Cavan recognize each other in the early years when he had come to Harvard from New York, “an unlicked cub,” as she loved to remind him. She belonged to an older, less complicated generation, the generation of Darwinians and Socialists for whom Debs, Huxley and Shaw were heroes. Edward Cavan, of the Eliot era, called himself a Christian Socialist; she would spare the adjective as irrelevant. But they had seen eye to eye in the Spanish Civil War of course, had thrown themselves passionately into the Republican side, speaking as a team before factory groups and at women’s clubs and colleges. This was in the early days of their friendship. Since then these strong intellectual and emotional ties had been firmly cemented. She regarded Edward as her dearest friend, almost as a son.

She tried the bell once more. Finally at the end of her patience, she went out into the street and shouted, “Edward! Hurry up!” in a piercing voice. The silence of the street echoed her cry. “I feel ill,” she said to herself. “It’s ridiculous to be so anxious, damn him!” She had tears in her eyes. She was trembling. For, in her seventies, Grace Kimlock was still a passionate person; the source of whatever ills she knew, neuralgia and that fast-beating heart, came from exasperated nerves which she had never bothered to control.

“It’s the state of the world,” she told herself. “We’re all as nervous as cats.” Really it was the worst year she could remember. As if it weren’t bad enough that the Communists had taken over Czechoslovakia—how wrong Edward had been proved about that, poor Edward—the fear of communism was taking over the United States. Even the conservative old Civil Liberties Union seemed changed and was all at sixes and sevens. Edward felt these things too much, that was the trouble—and where in thunder was he? Actually she had been standing there little more than two minutes, her heart thumping out its questions, when Edward Cavan ran down the steps.