Occasionally, in a charitable gesture toward putting the members of the circle at their ease, Fein drew one of his elegant pets onto his lap and stroked and petted it as he continued his informal remarks; he was the sort of professor whom Marya most admired—capable in an instant of making adroit and witty references to whatever suddenly presented itself, as if he had prepared the digression beforehand. (Cats as heraldic figures in art; cats as bearers of “occult” messages; cats in medieval texts, Renaissance lyrics, crudely pictured in A Discourse of Witchcraft, of 1621—a facsimile of which Fein happened to own, and delighted in showing them. Witchcraft, warned the Discourse, is a practice of deluded minds, / Where Grace is wanting soon admission finds.) But it was an eccentricity of the circle and of Fein’s students generally—wrongly ascribed as an eccentricity of his—that they did not particularly want to be put at their ease. They resisted, they smiled stiffly, shyly. As Marya’s friend Ernest dryly observed, You don’t come this far, and humble yourself in so many small ways, only to be reassured by Maximilian Fein that he is after all ordinary.

In any case, Marya thought, he wasn’t ordinary; no one could ever be deceived in that direction.

So Marya changed the malodorous cat litter, flushing it down the toilet (there was a windowless little toilet just beside the door to the cellar) and spreading in fresh litter; she changed the cats’ bowls, wiped them with paper towels, continued to speak cajolingly to the wary animals; but with little success. As she emptied a packet of cat food into one of the bowls the mottled black-and-white Persian, Twill, condescended to brush his silky tail against Marya’s leg; and that was all.

Marya thought of that enigmatic sonnet of Shakespeare’s with which, oddly, quirkily, she had in a way identified, years before:

They that have power to hurt and will do none,

That do not do the thing they most do show,

Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,

Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow. . . .

They are the lords and owners of their faces,

Others but stewards of their excellence.

She liked to think of Marya Knauer as unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow.