“I’m s—s—sorry.” Ivan blew his nose on an immaculate linen handkerchief. “I’m afraid I frightened Cissy.” In a second he was on his feet. “She’s very quiet.”

They found her sitting up, tense, her enormous dark eyes going from one to the other fearfully. Ivan went over and sat on the bed where he could put an arm around her, could explain that people had to cry sometimes, even grown-up people.

“Why do they?” she asked, turning to look at him with immense curiosity.

“Because they’ll burst otherwise.”

“Why will they burst?” she persisted like an inquisitor.

“Because”—he hesitated, then bowed his head before his child—“they’re so ashamed.”

“Don’t do it again, Daddy,” she said firmly. Don’t do it again, he said to himself as he went down the stairs and back to his study to try to work. But how did one change? Work was the drug—he had learned this long ago—the drug that never failed. When Angela brought in his lunch on a tray, he was so absorbed that he did not even lift his head.

The seminar was to meet at two. He had thought at first that he would simply have an announcement posted. But that, he knew, was evasion. It would be better to get it over with, once and for all. So, at precisely ten minutes to the hour, he put on a light overcoat and walked briskly down Kirkland Street toward the Common. It was a cruelly brilliant day; the dazzling light hurt his eyes. And he looked at all this as if he had become a stranger to it, a stranger to the immaculate thrust of the chapel steeple against the bright blue sky, a stranger to the uneven brick pavements of this, his Cambridge, the barberry bushes framing long green lawns, the Greek revival houses which the college was taking over one by one. He saw it all with a stranger’s, an outsider’s, eyes.