“He seemed bewildered, subdued … oh, I don’t know.” Joel sat down on the rug beside Cathy, leaning on one hand, rubbing the fur with the other. “How can you know what’s going on in his head?”

“Will they be able to help him, Olivia?” Christina asked.

Eben caught the question as he came back with Joel’s drink.

“How can a man be helped who’s fighting the battle of conservation alone, and in a village that couldn’t care less?”

He handed Joel his drink and took his own back from the mantel. Eben faced them now, his white hair like a crest, and dominated the room.

“The drugs will help,” Olivia whispered to Christina. “They’ll get him calmed down.”

“But he has a real problem,” Joel said intensely. “I mean it isn’t exactly madness to care so much”—he was looking straight at Cornelius—“or is it?”

“Well”—Cornelius turned his glass in his hands—“my answer has to be that sometimes to care too much, beyond all reason, is madness.”

“Why?” Joel asked.

“Because—at least in Nick’s case—it leads to violence.”

“It was very frightening,” Joel admitted. “It happened so fast. Nick, mild Nick, picking arbutus for his mother, suddenly like a wild animal. I suppose they’ve dug up that bank by now—he couldn’t stop them.”

“What you people forget,” Eben said, “is that here in Willard wilderness has always been the enemy, from the beginning when the first thing a settler did was cut down the primeval forest, burn the stumps, drag the rocks out, and plant corn and potatoes.”

“There were no potatoes in the eighteenth century, Eben,” Cornelius said dryly.

“Right—you have me there. The point is that maybe it needs some violence to reverse what has been going on for two hundred years. Now we are beginning to pollute the clear waters of the lakes. Half the brooks are unfit for fish or soon will be.”

“But you must admit, Eben, that Nick gets nowhere by attacking people!” Christina said.

“Yeats would answer you: ‘Even the wisest man grows tense/With some sort of violence/Before he can accomplish fate,/Know his work or choose his mate.’”

As Eben looked around him in triumph, Joel got slowly to his feet and faced him.

“Say that again, will you?”

And Eben repeated it.

“I don’t know,” Joel said, rubbing his eyes as if to rub away what they remembered—Nick, savage, dangerous, not himself.

“I can’t see why you have to be violent to choose a mate,” Cathy said, and everyone laughed. “Why are you laughing?” she said. “It wasn’t meant to be funny.”

“Why are we laughing?” Olivia asked herself. “A good question, and, to be quite honest, I don’t know why.”