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Warren for years. Warren had a very good memory, which he had never thought of as a handicap or an anti-social trait before he came to New Leeds. He used to store up the things his friends said and come back later, if need be, for clarification, after he had turned them over in his own mind. But here, when he reminded people of something they had said five years before, they either did not remember having said it or announced, lightly, that they had changed their opinion. This vagueness and instability put Warren in a dreadful state; he felt as if he held a ring of keys to fascinating cabinets that had had their locks changed privily by some malicious prankster. Looking at Miles now, for instance, brooding and silent, with his scarred chin sunk onto his chest, smoking a cigarette that his new wife had lit and put between his lips, Warren felt as if he might possibly have the key to him in that long-ago observation of Martha’s. But when he had recalled it to her, timidly, in another connection (for he did not see quite how it worked, Freudianly), Martha had made a grimace and said, with a rueful glance at John, “Oh dear, did I say that ?”
    Warren hungered for serious conversation, which was one of the reasons he had recently turned from nature to portraiture; he liked to draw the sitter out. On other occasions, he was constantly being disappointed, though New Leeds was full of people who had had interesting lives. “I’d like to get your point of view,” he would say, finally, at a cocktail party, to the person he had been waiting patiently to query, but the person, like as not, was tipsy by the time Warren got to him or else only wanted to gossip. Watching Miles today, Warren had the premonition that he was going to be disappointed again. Last year, when the Murphys had come down, Miles had been very interesting; he had advised Warren to read Nietzsche, and Warren had been looking forward to a renewal of the discussion. He had several points he wanted to make; he had underlined passages in the Modern Library Zarathustra that seemed to contradict some things Miles had said about Nietzsche’s thought. But Miles, when he had arrived this noon, had promptly turned the subject aside. “The translations are all terrible,” he said briskly. “You can’t understand Nietzsche if you don’t read him in German.” Warren, for a second, had been mad as a hornet; a few years ago, the same thing had happened with Plato. A point had come up, and Miles had said, “Read the Republic ,” and when Warren had done it and called up Miles in New York, all primed on the cave myth, Miles had told him that you couldn’t understand Plato except in the original. Reminded of his earlier admonition, he had said, “I don’t remember it. I must have been drunk.”
    Still, Warren had not yet given up hope of the afternoon. It all depended on chance. Miles, as Jane said, was a moody soul. It was the mixture of blood in him; he was half Irish and half German. Miles himself said it was the devil of a combination; when he was in black spirits, he talked about himself as a mongrel and blamed his parents for marrying. That was his Irish mood. On his German side, he was more poetic and visionary. He had a theory that the Germans and the Irish were all the same mystic people—Celts, and he used Jane’s tawny hair to prove it. He got his own red hair, he told them, from his mother’s family. He had an affinity with Jane; he liked to get her to talk about her German ancestors. That was why she always brought up the Moselle from her father’s cellar for him. Warren was interested in Jane’s ancestors too; the family’s scientific interests had opened his eyes to a whole new side of life and changed the direction of his painting. But he always felt a little disturbed when Miles got going on Friedrich Barbarossa—it made him think of the Nazis. In another mood, however, Miles would give the Germans what-for and say their trouble was they had