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esteemed, had, if it ever feebly stirred in him, been repressed without a pang, now the fear of being loved became a positive obsession with him. He saw annihilation stare at him in any half-affectionate glance. Though his whole activity was given over to the manipulation of the symbols of devotion—presents, visits, solicitous inquiries, games, walks in the country—still the validation of a single one of these tokens would suffice to ruin him, just as, it is presumed, the introduction of a single five-dollar gold piece into the channels of our currency would upset our entire monetary system. The liking of a single human being would translate him into the realm of measures and values, the realm of comparisons. Someone had valued him, and the whole question of his value was opened. From being a zero, the dead point at which reckoning begins, he became a real number, if only the tiniest fraction, and thus entered the field of competition. Or to put it another way, he passed from being an x, an unknown and inestimable quantity which could be substituted for a known quantity (Hugh Caldwell) in any social equation, to being a known quantity himself, that is he passed from algebra into arithmetic. He no longer represented Hugh Caldwell, but existing now on the same plane was capable of being compared with him. However, his whole merit had consisted of the fact that nobody could possibly like him as much as Hugh Caldwell could be liked; and indeed if anybody liked him one-half, one-quarter, one-tenth as much, it was enough to finish him as the family friend.
    A husband, hearing his wife’s voice quicken as she answered Francis Cleary’s telephone call, would be startled into asking himself the impermissible question: Why do we see that fellow? The light fervor of his wife’s tone jarred on his sense of what was fitting; it breached some unspoken agreement—she was not playing fair. He felt as if he had been duped. From that moment on, he disliked Francis Cleary intensely, and his wife would have to fight to get him invited to a party, just as if he had been one of her own friends. If she were loyal in her attachments, she would soon find herself trying to see him when her husband was out of town or working late at the office; she would meet him between engagements in the bars of quiet hotels. But this illicit atmosphere was deeply uncongenial to Francis. Her affection, her fidelity, could not begin to make up to him for the fact that he was no longer asked to her house. Indeed he hated her for that affection, which, as he saw it, was responsible for all the trouble. Like the husband, he experienced a sense of outrage; he too had been betrayed by her. With her inordinate capacity for friendship, she had gulled them both. She, on her side, became aware that Francis was suffering from his exclusion. She imagined (this particular wife was rather stupid) that he missed his old friend, her husband; and to save Francis pain she began to lie. “Jerry misses you terribly,” she would tell him, “but we see hardly anybody any more. Jerry hasn’t been feeling well. We stay home and read detective stories…” Francis, of course, knew better, and eventually it would happen that he met them when they were dining out with a large party of friends, and the poor wife’s duplicity would be exposed. All her nudges and desperate, appealing glances went unanswered—Jerry would not invite Francis to sit down at their table. After that, Francis was always too busy to see her when she called. If anybody mentioned her name, he spoke of her with a rancor that was for him unusual, so that people assumed either that she had come between Francis and his old friend, her husband, or that she had tried to have an affair with Francis and failed. Of the husband he continued to speak in the highest terms, thus reinforcing both of these theories. And his admiration was not simulated. He respected Jerry for the contempt in which Jerry held him—it was an