The writer considered whether this man, who had been so invisible the rest of the evening, had seen the report in full and knew—what?—that its blacked-out paragraphs contained nothing of significance? That Don had seen it and been meant to see it, so that a certain line of story might be more convincing to Don than another? Or was the radish-cheeked man gratified that Don had managed to find out, with a thoroughness born of the slow accumulation of detail he was famous for, what no one wanted him to know?

The room was butterflies of beating questions. Someone, a substantial woman in a blunderbuss of a suit, wore an expression of gravity; she looked as if she were on a witness stand, waiting for the cross-examination to begin. Mabel’s old best friend, now just an acquaintance, with luxuriantly long hair and a longer dupatta, had lips puckered as if to pull a face of intelligent concentration together from the disarray of her features. An ambassador from Eastern Europe with his closely cut hair and padded face, the smart writer with his tightened lips, Don with his merchant-banking gaze—all looked watered down, diluted somehow, to the pretty young woman. She was an English major now in law school. Her date had called the morning of the dinner to invite her. He talked fast. His confidence was overheated. It curdled her. Other men here were composed, and they were interesting to her.

“I don’t know. The report comes at a time when there is almost no debate inside the administration.” This came from the young writer, who had broken the silence, but with a tone that sought to suggest he hadn’t noticed it.

“Oh, there’s debate,” Don said. “Alliances are forming around smaller and smaller gradations in policy. Do we turn this bolt an eighth of an inch or a sixteenth?”

The historian looked at the young woman no one knew. He saw she was open to life. He wanted to get her away. He unrolled a scene in which he showed her Don’s study on some pretense and disabused her in a series of paragraphs, astonishments of concision, of the most pernicious soul-stealing misconceptions. Her tenacity of mind and a pliancy she implied with her posture—they tricked him into thinking he could tutor her.