Fein appeared to be entertaining his colleague’s ideas as if he took them seriously—as if, for Marya’s sake perhaps, or for the benefit of whoever happened to be listening, he, Maximilian Fein, he too, though a medievalist and something of a conservative, could be as fashionable as the newest “radical” theories. Fein even said, with a glance at Marya, that there was something to the reductivist notion that art is only playful and provisional; he couldn’t bear those earnest-minded citizens who drone about politics, society, moral content . . . the effluvia of meaning.

Marya had been sitting in silence for a half-hour or more; she knew that, if she spoke, she had better perform well—for certainly Fein had not brought her here, to display her to his male colleagues, merely to enjoy herself. But when she spoke her manner wasn’t at all conciliatory, her words were rushed, disjointed. She said they were each talking of meaning without meaning what they said; there was no “moral content” to their remarks; why should they be taken seriously?

The ruddy-faced gentleman regarded Marya with perplexity and amusement; Fein, with an ambiguous expression—he disapproved, of course, of such an outburst, but he was amused: Marya Knauer was his creature, after all.

Fein goaded her by saying that scholarship as well as art was very likely, at bottom, only play and improvisation and illusion; it played at meaning in order to justify its extraordinary demands of time, spirit; when one has spent his adult life in the service of certain projects one wants the world to believe, after all, that they have some relevance to the world. And Marya replied, stammering, that he surely didn’t mean that; wasn’t his own work a testament to—? He knew very well that his own work, his own ideas, were— And Fein interrupted her by saying with a trace of impatience that she was too young (“too young and too ferocious”) to even know what he meant: to know that there was a position—intellectual, moral, perhaps even physiological—from which all points of view are equally valid, or invalid. And Marya, stammering yet more angrily, said that he was simply pretending to be cynical—it was only a pose—she knew—she knew he didn’t mean what he was saying; and Fein interrupted her again, to say in a low rapid furious voice that she was displaying the mentality of an average citizen of the fifteenth century—or perhaps it was that of the average citizen of twentieth-century America—