He had often noticed that the first effect of shock is anger. A child hurts himself on a chair and is furious with the chair, for instance. So his own first reaction had been to think, The fool, the utter fool to throw away his life, his work—He had said this to Angela who had just looked at him out of her quiet blue eyes and had not answered; so now he was alone, utterly alone with his demons of self-doubt and self-hatred. But why did he feel so terribly alone? After all, he and Edward Cavan had been antagonists always. There’s no one left whom I respect—it’s that, he told himself, and did not think it strange that he could also call the man he respected so much an utter fool. But he knew suddenly that his main reason, the inner compulsion to write his book had been that Edward would read it, this close analysis of seven great American works of literature, at the opposite pole from Edward’s discursive book in which the background and growth of the writer had been emphasized at least as much as the work itself; this was to have been an answer, more than an answer, part of a diptych. In the deepest sense the roots were intertwined. They had been all along working together, for Edward, he knew, respected him, believed in him, only was extremely and perhaps rightly critical of Goldberg’s taking so much committee work. Lately Cavan himself had become something of an outsider in college affairs; at the same time Goldberg had become a power. But becoming a power had a price—and the price was that unfinished book which could now never be laid into Edward’s hands. He pushed away with a violent gesture the heavy desolation that seemed to be all around him in the air, that settled on the books, that filled his lungs and made him suddenly choke.