“You have felt like this before,” Fosca probed very gently. “It has to do sometimes with finishing a book.”

“I know. I’ve told myself that. Fosca”—he stopped and looked down at the old man, as if he were standing very far away looking down—“have you ever despaired?”

Fosca puffed on his pipe. “Yes,” he said, “when I was young.”

“Not since then?”

“I think not—what is it? Responsibilities—one is held to life by so many little threads as one grows older. If one snaps, there is always another. One imagines that one is needed.”

“I feel cut off from the students,” Edward said, sitting down again.

“They don’t feel cut off from you, Edward,” Fosca said earnestly. “You know”—he was deliberately changing the tone to a more relaxed one—“it’s a queer thing. But the very things that tear you to pieces, Edward, are what make them respect you. They know you’re really involved, you see. You’re not screaming in a high wind to them. You know you’re not.”

Edward visibly relaxed as if some almost unbearable strain had been eased. The shift from politics to teaching, Fosca thought. Now he’s in his element again—and it seemed so fantastic that Edward could not understand this himself, strapped himself again and again to the wheel of torment. “Quite a wail I’ve been making,” he was saying, smiling now across at the old man and putting his feet up on the footstool. “You are patient, Orlando, I must say, when crackpots come to call.” He lit a cigarette and smoked it really in the way a man emerging from physical pain smokes, “Of course my strength as a teacher is in seminar and as a tutor. I’m merely adequate at these big lectures—it seems so inhuman—and I’m not a performer, by nature,” he said ironically. “I have no desire to hypnotize six hundred students at a time, or to hypnotize anyone for that matter; it seems always slightly cheap.”

Fosca watched him silently, glad that at last Edward was here in the room, a fact made tangible by the way now he looked around him, looked for the first time at the chrysanthemums, then along the wall of books, and back at Orlando, his eyes gentle and thoughtful again and that strange look, as of an animal trying to get out of a prison, quite gone.

“How’s your book, by the way?” Edward asked then. “The last time I saw you, you had almost finished chapter four. You were happy about it …”

Orlando Fosca raised his eyebrows. “I had been feeding the donkey carrots,” he said. “Lately I have had to beat it. And then all these committees, you know”—he made an impatient gesture. “The administration”—and he made a wry face.