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studying her bare toes in her Mexican thong sandals and half-wondering whether she was getting a callous. You would never have thought, she said, that she and Warren would fit in; they were too normal. And yet they were crazy about it; and in ten years’ residence—they had come during the war when Jane had been certain the small city they lived in would be bombed—they had become an indispensable fixture. They were the social center of New Leeds; they supposed it was just because they were so normal. They served as a sort of switchboard that plugged in on the various crisscrossed lines. “We’re just a public utility,” said Warren with his mild, happy smile. In all the years they had been here, they had never had a fight with anybody, not even with Miles Murphy, who had fought with nearly the whole town at the time of his divorce from Martha. They had managed to keep his friendship while refusing to take sides. “I have a lot of respect for Miles,” Warren still reiterated, after seven years; he was not afraid to say it to Martha. As he explained to her when he was painting her portrait last month, he liked her because he could say to her the things he really thought. Loyalty to a side, he said, had been instilled in him by his southern mother, but he now thought you had to be loyal to all sides, to the truth as you saw it, which, when you came down to it, meant being loyal to yourself. Cleaning his brushes, he watched Martha anxiously to see if she followed his thought. He had a way, he knew, of making things that were simple, darn it, to other people very complex to himself, but Martha always listened, with her absent, encouraging nod. “Probably it’s an old idea to you,” he said apologetically, and Martha smiled. She never tried to deceive him. “I value that quality!” he always cried when her candid tongue was aspersed.
    What he valued in Miles was something different—Miles’s intellectual equipment. Sitting on the beach, in the noonday sun, he felt thrilled, as always, by Miles’s mind. The man was not attractive physically. He was a fat, freckled fellow with a big frame, a reddish crest of curly hair, and small, pale-green eyes, like grapes about to burst. His large face, with its long plump crooked nose, was flushed from the efforts of his digestive tract: lobster shells and the bones of two fried chickens lay piled up, waiting to be buried; two empty Moselle bottles, from Jane’s father’s cellar, lay on their sides in the sand. As usual, after eating and drinking, Miles was breathing heavily, like a spent athlete: he gave the impression of virtuous fatigue even when he had been overindulging. But he had a brilliant mind, and beside him Warren felt very humble. It was Warren’s great sorrow that he had gone straight from a military academy into art school; he had missed the experience of college. Miles had been educated by the Jesuits at Fordham, and from there he had gone on to Heidelberg and the Sorbonne and the London School of Economics. Later on, for a brief time, he had studied with Jung at Zurich. There was scarcely anything Warren could think of that Miles had not done; he had been a successful playwright, with a hit show, about the Jesuit fathers, running on Broadway when he was only twenty-three, a boxer, practically professional, who used to work out with Hemingway, a psychologist, a lay analyst, a writer of adventure stories, a practicing mystic, a magazine editor. He was on that kick, as he called it, when he met Martha, who was just a girl graduate at the time. He was the type, said Jane, that was very attractive to women; he had had three wives and innumerable mistresses and a couple of illegitimate children, besides the present baby and the little boy who had died. And of course, he was a heavy drinker, which proved, according to Martha, that he really cared nothing about women. All heavy drinkers, she had insisted, were sexless underneath—a remark that had been bothering