David Clark was neither strong nor handsome, but the bewildered look that had blighted his boyhood was long submerged now in a face that suggested intelligence and humor. For years he had made it a point of honor not to mess around with the girls in the classes he taught. “There isn’t any sport in it,” he would explain to other teachers. “It’s taking unfair advantage. It’s shooting fish in a barrel.” It was shyness too, and a terrible fear of rejection, though he didn’t usually mention those aspects of the matter.

But the whole of that argument had vanished some months ago when he found he could get through a lecture only by letting his gaze go back time and again, like that of a man seeking nourishment, to Miss Andrews in the front row.

And so he had walked right into it, like a comedian walking into a thrown custard pie.

He knew she might not really have meant it, even if she’d thought she did. Girls of that age were so busy being overwhelmed by romance and sex that they didn’t even know what they were saying half the time. Still, there it was—the last thing he had ever expected to hear from his favorite child.

And he was ready to crumple up and cry all over again as he held the car down to the speed limit on the Interstate, but he fought back the tears because he had to keep his eyes clear, and because his wife and the younger girls were waiting at home, and because everything else that made sense in his life would be waiting there too; and besides, no civilized man would go to pieces twice in the same day.

He hurried to the other dark bedroom, where he allowed himself just enough light from the hall for guidance.

“David?” Susan said, half asleep, turning heavily in the bedclothes. “Oh, I’m so glad you’re home.”

“Yeah,” he told her. “Oh, Jesus, baby, so am I.”

And in her arms he discovered that his life wasn’t over yet, after all.

Through the difficulties of two more years there were times of peace, times of exultant companionship and other times of exasperation and bickering, or of silence; it all seemed to settle out into what David called a good marriage.

“Hey, Susan?” he would ask now and then, affecting a boyish bashfulness. “Think we’ll make it?”

“Sure,” she would say.

He set his empty glass on the floor and got quickly to his feet, as he always did for shouting, but he didn’t shout. Instead he peered very closely at her face, as if trying to penetrate the surface of it, and said, “My God, you really mean this, don’t you. I’ve really lost you, haven’t I. You don’t—love me anymore.”

“That’s right,” she said. “Exactly. I don’t love you anymore.”

“Well, but for Christ’s sake, Susan, why? Can you tell me why?”

“There is no why,” she said. “There’s no more why to not loving than there is to loving. Isn’t that something most intelligent people understand?”

Alone in the kitchen, preparing drinks and coming to an abrupt, nervous decision that he’d better have a quick one now, here, before taking the tray into the living room, Dr. Andrews wondered once again what it was that could make him tremble in the presence of this dearest child, this particular girl. She was always so calm and so competent, for one thing. She had probably never done an incompetent or irresponsible thing in her life, except for wasting her Turnbull College tuition that time—and that, now that he thought of it, was nothing at all compared to the way millions of other children had behaved in those years, with their flowers and their love beads, their fuzzy-headed Eastern religions and their mindless pursuit of drug-induced derangement. Maybe David Clark could be thanked, after all, for having steered her away from all that; but no, that wasn’t right. The credit couldn’t go to Clark because it belonged to Susan herself. She was too intelligent ever to have been a vagabond, just as she was too honest to go on living with a man she no longer loved.

Agnes Andrews would be sixty before very long, and for many years she had been obliged to wear spectacles with lenses so thick that it wasn’t easy to see the expression in her eyes: you had to rely on the smile or the frown or the patient, neutral look of her mouth. And her husband had to acknowledge that the rest of her was rapidly aging too. There wasn’t much left of her once-lustrous hair except what the hairdresser could salvage and primp; her body sagged in some places and was bloated in others. She looked like what she was: a woman who’d been called Mother in shrill, hungering voices for most of her life.

Long ago, almost beyond memory, she had been a neat, crisp, surprisingly passionate young nurse whose flesh he had been wholly unable to resist. The only minor deterrent, easily ignored from their first night right on up through the night he’d proposed to her (“I love you, Agnes; oh, I love you, and I need you. I need you…”), the only qualifying aspect of his love had been his knowledge that some people—his mother, for one—might think it strange of him to marry a girl of the working class.