On the dresser beside the bed, in an oval frame, was the photograph of a dark-haired child: sullen, pretty, with a small fierce chin and shadowed eyes: perhaps ten years of age. There was something both infantile and malicious about her expression. Marya held the photograph to the light and examined it for several seconds, intently. She could see—she believed—Maximilian Fein’s features in the child, about the mouth especially.

(Disconcerting, to think of the Feins as parents. Else Fein giving birth, Maximilian Fein an excited father. Both of them young—Marya’s age perhaps. And then what had happened? The girl had died of rheumatic fever—or was it a respiratory disease—they had grieved, mourned, had no further children. Marya was greatly moved though she could not have said why. Someday, she thought, she might ask Fein about his daughter—if she dared. If they were ever that close.)

Now the child eyed her with a faint mysterious smile. Her deep-set gaze gave an old-world, legendary quality, a look of fate, as if she knew very well that she was destined to die young; and wanted no sentimental pity.

For some reason Marya thought of an incidental remark Fein had made during one of their early seminars. The subject was asceticism and the mortification of the flesh in the ancient world, the so-called pagan world; Fein spoke of the voluntary self-castration of priests in the service of the Magna Mater. Evidently self-castration and the inducing of impotence by way of herbal medicines were not at all uncommon in the ancient world: but now (so Fein mused, with his thin-lipped smile), if a man merely speculated about such practices, what might society call him!

The members of his circle shifted uneasily in their seats, one or two made an attempt to laugh—for perhaps Fein meant to be funny? Marya, frowning, had been making little nervous zigzag marks in the margin of her notebook. . . . In the service of the voracious Magna Mater, men were driven to strange forms of worship, Fein concluded.

By this time Marya was damp with perspiration and her heart seemed to be swinging from side to side. Elation, euphoria, on the verge of—might it be panic? The terror of mortals as they approached the great god Pan, in the chartless depths of the ancient forest?

One of the cats (it was snow-white Deuteronomy) leaped onto the bed; circled several times and lay down in the indentation between the pillows. He seemed to know the spot well but Marya wondered if she had better haul him away. Had the door to the Feins’ bedroom been ajar, or had she opened it herself? . . . She couldn’t remember.

She opened the door to the enormous clothes closet, which smelled of mothballs, stale warm air, that rich tobacco scent. Fein’s clothes—coats, trousers, shirts, sweaters, neckties—were to one side; his wife’s to the other. His shoes to one side and his wife’s to the other. But the division of the closet was distinctly uneven—Fein had far more clothes than his wife. And Fein’s side of the closet was more neatly arranged.