“The trouble with the liberals is that they see all sides. It paralyzes them.” He was half-smiling now, that ironic smile she knew well. “It was quite all right to be radical twenty years ago—at least in these parts. Now I frighten my students if I mention the New Deal. Actually they’ve never heard of the Spanish War. They’re not interested in politics—even the best of them,” he said bitterly, “like Hastings.” They were close to the State House, standing back from the hill up its serene flights of steps, the red brick façade turned a warm rose in the late afternoon sun, the cupola, bright shining gold.

“Dear old thing.” Grace gave it an affectionate glance. “Isn’t it lovely to have the dome gold again? Lovely.” She stopped a moment here in the final open space before Beacon Street grows dark with office buildings.

“Yes, the dome’s gold again …” He left the sentence in the air. But she knew what he was thinking as the current of intimacy flowed between them again. She knew very well what he was thinking as he turned and looked about him, a slightly quizzical expression in his blue eyes.

Certain elements of Boston are gathered in this block in concentrated essence. Beside the office buildings, where the Civil Liberties Union is squeezed in among various Protestant Church organizations, stands the Athenaeum, that private library which is also a private heaven (Good Americans may go to Paris when they die; good Bostonians go to the Athenaeum). Just up the street on the same side is Goodspeed’s, for rare books and prints, and across from it the Bellevue Hotel where, at lunchtime, boys from the State House and Protestant ministers elbow each other. All this debouches into the wide hilly expanse of the Common. This Boston may look sedate, ancient and settled to an outsider, but to Edward Cavan and Grace Kimlock, standing on the corner, its tradition was a living one, a tradition of reform, protest, fierce belief in general enlightenment and in the rights of minorities. Not for nothing was their final glance for the corner where Robert Gould Shaw stood in bas-relief leading his Negro regiment into battle.