George almost resented Pen’s attitude of an uncommitted observer. Would she, in fact, sense the undercurrents of fear, of admiration, of something like reverence but sharper and less comfortable, which this man created in his students? He glanced at her, leaning forward, all intelligence and spring—yes, she would get it. If anyone would, Pen would.

Kovarsky had started reading a paper on Willa Cather. He read explosively and badly, running whole sentences together and then pausing for breath in the middle of one, and was plainly nervous. Cavan was listening intently. He made no notes, but once moved jerkily in his chair and smoked incessantly, lighting one cigarette from another. You could almost see the thoughts crossing his eyes, the questions, the disagreements, the moment of rather greater interest as Kovarsky approached the center of his thesis. George was relieved that this was evidently one of the better papers—Pen would be duly impressed. Kovarsky’s theme seemed to be that Cather stood outside the creative stream of the novel in America, that she was a minor master in the classic novel, but had sacrificed too much in the process, that for instance in Death Comes for the Archbishop she had entirely evaded the problem of Catholicism in a democratic country, that her individual characters, real and realized as they were, failed to become representative because they were set against an incompletely understood background from a sociological point of view. This, he suggested, was abundantly clear in the late novel laid in Virginia, Sapphira and the Slave Girl.

When Kovarsky finished, he leaned back and lit a cigarette, his hand shaking, glancing nervously round to feel the reaction, obviously shy of looking at Cavan, sitting there silent, but dangerous like a bomb which might explode. One reason for the tension in the class was that Edward Cavan never had any ready-made phrases at hand, the kind which smooth over and open the way for relaxed discussion. His teaching was a process of thinking which moved forward right in the classroom by sudden jerks, as if his spoken words were a rough draft which he corrected as he went along, often retracing his path. It was a complex kind of improvising in which, as he talked, he seemed to move outward to include more and more, really a kind of exploration. Sometimes there were astonishing silences when his own concentration, as his forehead flushed, acted on the students like a spell and they waited, breathless, for the sudden brilliant torrent which would break the dam. This happened rarely and only when he was moved. It was happening now.