“Who is?” Edward said testily, and then more quietly, “I expect she’s bothered about me right now, as a matter of fact. I walked out of a Civil Liberties Union meeting this afternoon, idiotic thing to do. I had a brainstorm.”

“She probably was delighted.” Fosca kept to a light tone. “She loves a fight, as you well know. What was it about, this tempest in a teapot?”

Edward raised his head and looked at Fosca with such intensity that the old men retreated, “It was not a teapot, Edward? Are you serious? What is all this about? You had better try to explain. In the first place I didn’t know you took the Civil Liberties Union to the very center of your heart——”

“No, no,” Edward said impatiently. “It’s just that Damon has finally come out into the open. He can’t be trusted any more.”

“So?” Fosca brought his two hands together, the tips of the fingers meeting judicially. “And what exactly do you mean by that?”

“I mean that on a matter of absolute principle, Damon backed down, ratted. Oh, it doesn’t matter about the specific thing. It’s just a straw in the wind. But that Damon of all people should back down, now——”

“Drink your coffee, man, and sit down like a human being and talk to me.” Fosca followed the pacing figure with his eyes and quietly relit his pipe. “Now begin at the beginning.”

While Edward briefly outlined what had happened at the Union meeting, leaning forward in his chair, speaking in short clipped angry sentences, Fosca watched him, but what he listened to was not the words. For some time now he had had the feeling that Edward, the real Edward, was imprisoned somewhere trying to communicate, that somewhere there was a prisoner desperately rapping on a wall, and it was these intermittent attempts to communicate to which Fosca listened.

“You see?” Edward ended. “It’s finished between Damon and me. I can’t see him again.” He took out a cigarette and lit it, sitting hunched up now, emptied of his anger and his story.

Fosca puffed at his pipe for some moments in silence.

“You do see?” Edward asked again, and this time he wanted an answer.

“I see that you feel personally betrayed,” Fosca said quietly.

“I have a right to, surely.”

It was a strange image which went through Fosca’s mind—that if he could only bring Edward into the room, if he could open some door that would bring Edward really into the room, into the atmosphere of the room, instead of locked away in some blank arid room of his own, that would solve everything. But how to do it?

“I’m prepared to see that from your angle Damon has betrayed you, but I am not so sure that he has betrayed himself, Edward.”