“Come along,” she commanded, as she found Edward again just where she had left him. “We might as well get it over with.” Before the slow-moving elevator crept down to them, they were joined in the marble hall by Damon Phillips, his pockets bulging with newspapers as usual, two brief cases, one half-open, in his hands, and that air of perpetual harassment and gusto which made him endearing. Phillips was a Harvard professor in physics. In him everything that seemed bottled up and tense in Cavan spilled over; it was the thing to say that if only Phillips would stick to his last and not try to be Universal Man, he might end up with a Nobel prize. If Edward Cavan’s students sometimes thought of him as a small compact animal, a woodchuck or hedgehog, Phillips might be caricatured as a long-legged heron, all angles and awkward sudden flight. The two men had always been friends, meeting often at Grace Kimlock’s house. So it had been until the year of Wallace’s Progressive Party. Phillips, after considerable soul-searching, had cast his vote for Truman, and since then there had been a rift between them which no amount of geniality on the surface could quite conceal.

But at least here, Grace thought, greeting him with a pat on the shoulder, we still see eye to eye. I do not have to feel nervous about Damon.

“What’s up today?” he asked, and then, without waiting for an answer, crumpled up a paper from his brief case and threw it on the floor, “I’m sick and tired of these meetings. What makes us keep on exposing ourselves to such boredom and frustration, eh, Edward?”

“Well, at the moment some pretty dirty bills are brewing, little Dies Committee stuff,” Edward said drily.

“Hey, wait for Beatrice,” Damon called, as the elevator door was closing on them. “You’re just in time. The Old Guard is now complete.”

Beatrice Carr laughed. “Are we really the Old Guard? I prefer to consider us the Radical Wing.” She was a middle-aged stout woman with short-cut gray hair, an old black suit, and held two bulging rubber bags since it was her habit to go to Faneuil Hall and load up on groceries before these monthly meetings. Beatrice had been on the committee in one capacity or another longer even than Grace; she was a professional, had even run for Governor on the Progressive Party ticket. Many people suspected her of being a Communist, a fact which she knew perfectly well, but she believed that if you begin to explain yourself you have already capitulated, and she went her way, quite fearless.