“Relatively absolute.” He smiled across at her indulgently. “One man’s blank wall turns out to be another’s open door—sometimes. It’s not as black and white as all that, Julia. It’s more like walking in the dark, feeling your way”—he swallowed down the last of his drink and stood up, leaning on the mantel, rubbing his face with his hands as if to rub out the deep lines.

“Do you think I’ve wasted time?” he asked her suddenly.

“How?” For she did not follow his thought. He had leapt off somewhere else now.

“Oh, by all the things I can’t resist having a finger in like the Civil Liberties Union, or the Institute of Contemporary Arts. My colleagues think I’m a crackpot, the seedy end of some sort of old-fashioned liberal tradition, you know—that’s what Goldberg thinks.”

“Unregenerate curiosity, that’s all,” she said answering his half-smile. “Oh, I don’t know, Damon”—it was true that he had wanted everything, that he had always been avid as if there was some hunger in him that nothing could satisfy—“but surely Goldberg is the type of the scholar in blinders. I’d hate you to be like that.”

“He’s a thorn in Edward’s side. They had quite an argument at the meeting today, went off together afterwards though, magnetized by their disagreement. There’s no one I can talk to,” Damon groaned.

“You talk to Hinton and Couperin, don’t you?” These were colleagues in his own department, but Damon had never chosen his friends from among his colleagues.

“Oh, in a way, Hinton tells me dirty stories and Couperin teases me in one way or another. I’ve always been a maverick in the department. The mathematicians think I’m a philosopher and the philosophers think I’m a mathematician—I feel lonely,” he said in a cross tone of voice, “damned lonely. It’s Edward” he came back to the sore point, in spite of himself.

“It’s time we had something to eat,” Julia said firmly. She felt she must have some food before they got onto this again.