“You’ll have to go to him, talk to him—you’ll have to, Damon. He won’t do it. You know that.”

“I think Julia will have to do it.”

“Why Julia?” Julia, Damon’s wife, had always seemed to Grace one of these cowlike women whom one looked on simply as appendages to a man.

“Because Julia has a real relationship with Edward, just as real as mine—and because she’s a woman.”

“Why because she’s a woman?” Grace Kimlock, ardent feminist though she was, really disliked women.

“Whatever gentleness there is in Edward comes out in relation to women, that’s all. He’s less thorny with Julia. He used to come and have tea with her two or three times a week. I often thought he was a little in love with her, but of course he would never admit it, even to himself——”

Grace gave a deprecatory sniff.

“The queer thing is that we none of us really know Edward, do we? And lately it’s been hard to know him, he reacts so violently, like a wounded bear if you touch him——”

“With me he’s not like that,” she said firmly.

“No”—Damon gave her a quizzical glance, tender and amused—“I expect not. You agree with him, you see. You don’t raise any troubling questions. Politically, Edward is on the brink of an abyss, he’s just balancing himself somehow on the will to believe. I don’t suppose any of us can measure what the Czechoslovakia business did to him, Grace.”

“I don’t see that you have to give up believing something just because in one instance it hasn’t worked,” she said, flushing. And there it was again, the rift, the ache, the sense that at some point now communication broke down.

“Never mind,” Damon said, impatiently swerving round a truck and nearly colliding with an oncoming car. “That’s not the point really …” He was himself, Grace thought grimly, near exasperation.

“What is the point, Damon?” she asked. “Slow down. I want to see the river,” she commanded. For whatever else failed, the river was always there, a quiet glory, darkened over by the curving bridges, reflecting all the points of light of student rooms in the Harvard Houses, in the Business School on the far side. Whatever loyalties might fail, this loyalty to the University remained steadfast, and rose up in her like a balm.

The traffic slowed down, stopped at a red light, just under Eliot House. For a moment Damon said nothing, though he was much too impatient and nervous a driver to pay attention to the river, his hands gripping the wheel like a racer, as if he could leap forward when the light changed and would not be stopped by the slow crawling crescendo of cars ahead.