Ernest Slater spoke with the fastidious melancholy of one who has seen, if not experienced, a great deal. He was all of twenty-six years old; married; he’d almost been a father, once—but he and his wife had done the pragmatic thing, the necessary thing, and had an abortion. He had been in the graduate school for five years—“enclosed in its stony womb”—studying Old High German, Middle High German, Old Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Medieval French, linguistic theory. And all in preparation for what promised to be a massive dissertation under Maximilian Fein’s guidance. He was slender, tall, prematurely balding; his shyness could be mistaken for severity; his playful and gently ironic tone could be mistaken—as it frequently was, even by his friends—for cynicism. He had recently discovered, he told Marya, inexcusable gaps in his background: he would have to study Romance linguistics and semantics before beginning his dissertation with Fein—which meant a delay of another year, at least. He hoped, he told Marya half seriously, that his wife wouldn’t leave him in the interim.

Marya, not knowing what sort of response Ernest wanted, could neither concur nor protest.

“But there are no shortcuts in this life, after all,” Ernest said. “Unless it’s to failure. Or death.”

THE FEINS RETURNED from Europe on schedule, Marya handed the key over to them, she and Professor Fein exchanged a long neutral look as they stood together in the shadowy front foyer of the house . . . Marya flushed and a little breathless from her bicycle ride, Fein rather severe, edgy. He was, he said, suffering a mild sort of reaction to the transatlantic flight. His wife was really a better traveler than he—her health, her nerves, were sounder. And what of Marya, did she like to travel? Had she been to Europe?

No, Marya said. Not yet.

AT THE NEXT Thursday evening meeting of the seminar Fein surprised them all with a little banquet.

They were served stuffed cabbage loaf; potato griddle cakes; fried pork sausage; egg noodles; and an elaborate brioche filled with candied apricots. Mrs. Fein had prepared the food but an undergraduate student served it—Mrs. Fein made no appearance downstairs at all, though Marya and the others would have liked to thank her for her kindness, and tell her how superb the food was. (“Well—Else does not need to be told such things, perhaps,” Fein said. “It is enough for her to nourish us all and then to absent herself . . . it is her Kaiser-slauten temperament.”)

Fein himself was in an excellent mood. He found things to praise in the several papers that were presented in the seminar; his critical remarks were less acerbic than usual; he smiled a great deal; he was even wearing a somewhat informal outfit—a black turtleneck sweater with a lightweight beige coat. Though he remarked that the conference had drained him of a great deal of energy they gathered that it had been a considerable success, so far as his presentation was concerned; and the visit to the Prado had been immensely invigorating. Bosch’s ecclesiastical diableries filled him with a curious sort of atavistic rapture, as if he were in his temperament—though assuredly not in his intelligence—a fifteenth-century man. A late cousin to Philip II of Spain.