Putting on the coffee, mixing the salad dressing, Julia was free to think. She knew why Damon was haunted by Edward—or thought she knew. There was something violent in Edward, passion perhaps, which Damon always seized on in other people. For with all his curiosity, his multiple interests, his sense of being driven, it was not after all passion which drove Damon. It was hunger. Fame was what he starved for and all these things were substitutes, ersatz—the committees, the chairmanships, the little essays in The Atlantic—they filled the hole but did not nourish. Julia guessed that his disappointment over whatever it was that had not worked out these last six months was greater than he admitted. He had worked too hard, all summer—she put the casserole on the table, water in the glasses, feeling all her love flow out into these habitual gestures. Strange, how quickly it happened, the change—we are this warmth and this coldness, strangers, lovers, friends, enemies. People talk about “a happy marriage” and it meant, she supposed, all this, the complex creation hour by hour and minute by minute, the revolt and the acceptance. And now the meal ready, arrival at the end of the day.

“It will be all right, Damon. You’ll see,” she said out of all these thoughts.

“I wish you’d call Edward.” He ate ravenously, too fast, as he always did, coming back for more when Julia herself had barely begun, pouring out the coffee in the middle of the meal out of sheer restlessness. Their two children had nervous indigestion as a result.

“We haven’t heard from Bess for ages,” she said irrelevantly. Bess, their younger one, was at Bryn Mawr. The boy, John, in the army at a camp in North Carolina.

“You never listen.” Damon was cross. “I asked you a question.”

“Oh yes—” She came back from her thoughts about baking a cake for Bess tomorrow. “But why should I, Damon? After all——”

“He’s always liked you in a rather special way,” Damon said carelessly.

She was staggered by the indifference of this. For Edward, it was true, had used to come nearly every day at teatime, sit and talk or be silent, always there, like a still pressure which she did not understand or know how to handle.

“That was two years ago. He doesn’t come very often now.”

“Still, you’re a woman——”

“What has that got to do with it?”

“I don’t know. He’s a queer duck. He doesn’t really love women, but he needs them, gets on with them somehow. Do you know what I mean?”