“You know women are very personal, Eben. That is their great quality, and I sometimes think their one defect. Sometimes I feel cooped up. It would be a real boon if you dropped in now and then and we could talk—about politics, for instance. I get wind of things. This chap Marcuse, for instance—can one take him seriously? The young seem to. I’m an old-fashioned man, more so than perhaps I once was, but the old bean still gets stirred up by ideas.” He paused to smile a mischievous smile. “Christina will be jealous, you know. She thinks of you as her friend.”

“No, we were never friends,” Eben said quietly.

“Why not? Let’s clear the decks, for once, Eben. It would do us both good.”

“I was in love with her, of course—fifty years ago.”

“And still are a little perhaps?”

“We light each other up—always did. She was the unattainable for me, Cornelius. The unattainable haunts. Not a bad thing for an old man to be haunted. The past is alive.”

“People think the old have no feelings. Why, I feel so much more than I did as a boy that there’s no comparing it. But it doesn’t hurt so much—odd thing.”

“When I was twenty, you knocked me down one day in the woods. You were engaged then.”

“Then I saw red. Now we can talk about it. There are great advantages to being old. For one thing, one’s idea of the past, especially the personal past, changes. I must confess I thought then that you were a cad.”

Eben laughed.

“By your standards I guess I was. No hard feelings, Cornelius. But how does that past look to you now—and the native who had the arrogance to try to take your girl away from you?”

“I think I was damned lucky. You had more to offer than I did then.”

“Such magnanimity!” Eben said ironically.

“No, just common sense. But it wouldn’t have worked, you know. Christina would have eaten you up, and I suspect that Olive nourished you.”

“Yes, she did,” Eben said. There were tears in his eyes. He hoped that Cornelius would not see them. “That is just what she did.”

Cornelius had closed his eyes again.

“There aren’t so many people left who can remember back fifty years with me. Old friends, even old rivals, get to be rather precious, don’t they?” And he added, “It must be damned lonely up there, Eben. You must come down and see us often. Will you?”

“I will.”

When John and Christina came back bearing trays of soup, the two old men were discussing Marcuse’s ideas of revolution.

CHRISTINA’S JOURNAL—February 10