“Colin’s personal books were at home. He wasn’t a grind. At home he never worked more than twenty minutes at a sitting. He could work at his desk and follow a television program at the same time. He did it all the time. Once at a party someone said he saw another person add a list of double numbers—twenty-nine, forty-three, eighty-six—as someone else read them aloud. Colin said that it was a stupid trick and that he could do it, too. The other man wanted to bet him ten dollars. Colin made it fifty and then he did the trick, without ever having tried it before. He told me that later. The man got upset and the party could have been wrecked then if Colin hadn’t told him to split the fifty between his wife and me. We saw that Colin was trying to save the evening and took the money. At other parties people would try to talk Colin into doing it again, but he wouldn’t. He was that sort of person; he could say no and make it stick.

“With Colin there were people who could do no wrong and others who could do no right. He would say hello to them, but I knew the things he could pretend to do, and one of them was that he could pretend to look at people. He would smile and nod, but his eyes wouldn’t be focused. I know that because he would tune me out in the same way if I bored him with some trivial crud. I got out of that habit.