He did not answer her question until they were out of the worst traffic and swinging along under the avenue of plane trees. Then, as if emotion had suddenly drained out of him, as if the moment had exploded for him some time back and now there was no vital energy left, he said quietly, “As a scientist it shocks me to see someone as blindly, as emotionally committed to an idea as Edward is to the idea that Communists and Socialists can work together. Don’t you see that he’s on the defensive? He’s too intelligent for that, Grace—don’t you see?”

“But people who are not emotionally committed, as you put it, never get anything done, Damon. Look at the Civil Liberties Union.”

Damon jerked the car to a stop in front of Grace’s house on Fayerweather Street.

“What about Fosca?” she said suddenly.

“What about him?”

“He could talk to Edward,” she said with immense relief as if she had caught hold of a life preserver. “People are what matter, Damon. At least we can agree on that.”

“Don’t give me up for lost, Grace,” he said, turning to her now and searching her eyes, “will you?”

“I hate it all so,” she said as he helped her out. “I’m so tired, Damon,” she said leaning on his arm a moment, as if this were actually true and she was a very old lady.

“You, tired? Nonsense,” he teased, but it was a perfunctory response after all. He was already gone.

She watched the taillights of the car vanish up the street and stood there a moment, leaning on her umbrella, the damp leafy smell rising up from the earth all around her like solitude itself. She stood outside her garden on the street dramatizing her own sense of being abandoned, old, lonely, and somehow unable to cope any longer. Every day now it seemed as if chaos and uncertainty came a step nearer—now, at the meeting, this flare-up between Edward and Damon. “The state of the world,” as she called everything that troubled her, was breaking into the most secret places, the intimate circle, the final bastion. And for the first time in many years, she doubted herself. She felt frightened of what lay ahead.

Then she stooped down to caress an enormous black cat who was winding himself round her legs.

“Oh, Horace,” she said, relief flooding her as if this animal warmth and trust had given her back her strength, “you funny old puss,” and turned and went in, the black tail waving triumphantly up the path before her.

III

III