Now it pounced. It pounced because she suddenly saw Edward’s face very clearly, and as if for the first time, the long narrow forehead, the disarming reddish hair, the shy lonely eyes behind glasses and the queer tense mouth that could clamp shut so hard. It was solid like a piece of sculpture. Two nights ago this face was a real face; it existed. Now it did not. Death, she thought: people just disappear. They are suddenly not there. He was here in this room, gentle and quiet at first, smiling at Damon’s oldest jokes brought out nervously for the occasion; his suit needed pressing; he had praised her French peas; he had all that time been carrying his death around inside him like a secret; and they had not been able to get through to him, to hold him back. “Why isn’t love enough?” she asked the walls again, and each time she asked this question the same thing happened. She began to cry. It was like some awful wound inside her; and now she had begun, she knew she would never stop, or so it seemed. But suddenly she sat up. She had remembered John in boot camp. She must write to John at once, quickly, before Damon came back and needed her. So it is that life pulls one forward, she thought; there is no time to weep anything out; there is always a human responsibility to pull one back from the abyss—but here she stopped on her way to her desk and stood quite still. What if there were no immediate responsibility and one came face to face with one’s life on its own terms as Edward had? What then? But I must telephone to Bess, she thought, at Bryn Mawr. I shall have to think all this out later. And what would she say to the children? When they asked, “Couldn’t you do anything, Mother?” What could she say?

He didn’t trust us any longer, you see. He felt we were beyond the pale, out there in that alien world which was closing in on him. The enemy, in fact. No, that was not the thing to say to the children.

They went forth to battle but they always fell;

Nobly they fought and bravely, but not well …

What was it? That old poem she had used to recite in school, the romantic appeal of failure. But this will not do, she thought, sitting down at her desk and again blowing her nose. She must summon the whole of herself and write to John. She must tell him. She must explain that such things happened in our time. Masaryk, Winant. It was not a company of weak men, of cowards. She undid her pen. She must say it in such a way that Edward was not diminished in John’s eyes; it is rather we who are diminished in our own. Yes …