George Hastings did not answer his phone which rang ten times during the morning. He lay on his bed slowly, almost contemptuously drinking down a bottle of whiskey. He had not bothered to dress. The shades were drawn. “Men can’t stand too much reality,” he repeated from some poem, some play. Who had said it? An imaginary group of professors sat in a circle round him. It seemed to be the oral exam for the doctorate. Who said it? “Auden,” he guessed, and met their pitying look. He knew very well that what was driving him to get completely blotto was shame. He had not been able to feel anything, you see, when Jack brought in the paper, white and shaken. I loved him, he was like a father to me, but all I could think of when I got the news was, Now I’ll never get that instructorship. This certainly shoots that to hell. Pretty fine specimen, I am, the great intellect, but no soul, he thought, taking a long drink. It tasted awful. He disliked it almost as much as he disliked himself. There was emptiness. There was shame. There was nausea. There was whiskey. There was nothing else. No Cavan. No feeling. That’s what Harvard added up to—no Cavan, no feeling. Just the intellect and waste. Nothing in between. No feeling. No instructorship. Repeating the same words over and over, they finally became just words, unrelated to anything, discs with words on them floating round in the air. He had set up a cycle that he found he could not break, and suddenly he was terrified, shaking with fear, his pajamas dripping wet. He staggered out into the bathroom and glared at his unshaven face as if it belonged to an enemy. This was not himself, obviously, this sullen object of disgust. The image blurred, and George was sick into the basin.