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her manner the same nervous readiness to concede that one might expect in a boy sparring with his gym teacher. The metaphor, in fact, if you add to it a touch of Pygmalion and Galatea, pretty well covers everything about their relationship that I could see that evening, and though I’d no ultimate objection at all to such a relationship—after all, Galatea was a remarkable woman, and some uneasy young pugilists grow up to be Gene Tunney—the presence of two so similarly forceful people was overwhelming: I several times caught myself whipping my head from side to side as they did, at some especially witty remark, or gesticulating excitedly after their fashion while making a point.
    As for Joe, the first hour of conversation made it clear that he was brilliant, one of the most brilliant people I’d met. He spoke slowly and softly as a rule, with a slight Southern accent, but one had always the feeling that this slowness did not come natural to him; that they were controls that he maintained over his normal ebullience. Only when the turn of the conversation excited him did his speech rise in volume and rapidity: at these times he was likely to scratch his head vigorously, jab his spectacles hard back on his nose, and gesture eloquently with his hands. I learned that he’d taken his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Columbia—the one in literature, the other in philosophy—and had completed all the requirements except the dissertation for a doctorate in history at Johns Hopkins. Wicomico was Rennie’s home town and WTC her alma mater: the Morgans were staying there while Joe made a leisurely job of the dissertation. Talking with him for an evening was tremendously stimulating—I was continually impressed by his drive, his tough intellectuality, and his deliberateness—and, like any very stimulating thing, it was exhausting.
    We took to each other at once: it was clear in a very short time that if I remained in Wicomico we would be close friends. My initial estimate of him I had completely to revise; it turned out that those activities of his and aspects of his personality about which I had found it easy to make commonplace criticisms were nearly always the result of very careful, uncommon thinking. One understood that Joe Morgan would never make a move or utter a statement, if he could help it, that he hadn’t considered deliberately and penetratingly beforehand, and he had, therefore, the strength not to be much bothered if his move proved unfortunate. He would never have allowed himself to get into a position like Miss Rankin’s, for example, or like mine when I was circling around the college driveway on Monday. Indecision of that sort was apparently foreign to him: he was always sure of his ground; he acted quickly, explained his actions lucidly if questioned, and would have regarded apologies for missteps as superfluous. Moreover, four of my least fortunate traits—shyness, fear of appearing ridiculous, affinity for many sorts of nonsense, and almost complete inconsistency—he seemed not to share at all. On the other hand, he was, at least in the presence of a third party, somewhat prudish (he didn’t enjoy my story) and, despite his excitability, seemingly lacking in warmth and spontaneity, though he doubtless had as clear reasons for being so as he had for being a scoutmaster—he was a man whom it was exceedingly difficult to criticize. Finally, for better or worse he seemed completely devoid of craft or guile, and in that sense ingenuous, though by no means naïve, and had no interest in any sort of career as such.
    All this was exhausting, most exhausting, to encounter. We talked concentratedly until one-thirty in the morning (I could not begin to remember what about), and when the Morgans left I felt that the evening had been the pleasantest I’d spent in months; that in Joe I’d found an extremely interesting new acquaintance; and that I had no special wish to see this interesting new acquaintance