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came from inside and wanted to know:
    â€œMama says, how long?”
    â€œTen minutes. Tell her Doc is here.” The lather was on, and he was performing the initial going-over. “I don’t know, her feet hurt. I tell her she shouldn’t be on her feet so much, but she says I should use my head and that is what feet are for. What I meant before was that this is a new situation. Unprecedented, although I don’t like the word, a dangerous word. But everything’s different, and we’re wrong if we expect it to be like before.”
    â€œTell her to come to the office tomorrow.”
    â€œSure. But unprecedented is not ruled out. Everything changes. I don’t understand it, but I will. Sometimes I just put my finger on it. But the situation is apathetic. They should have five hundred pickets at each gate. Instead, they got ten. It is a situation of love, but my instincts tell me it’s murderous. Love and hate are twins—was it Dante said that? I never read Dante; I mean to some day, but now I quote him—it gives me pride in a national origin.”
    â€œHow do you quote him, if you don’t read him?” Abbott wanted to know.
    â€œNobody else reads him, so I quote him. I give him equal parts of vision and sound economic understanding. I try to do him justice. If a people’s artist of a great nation did not say something that he should have said, is it my part to belittle him?”
    His wife came out, a plump, round-faced woman of thirty or so. “I could hear inside,” she said, “but not the doctor’s point of view. You allow him to say yes and no, Joe. That’s a concession. Doctor, Joe’s reasoning is valid until it concerns something practical. He wants me to get off my feet. He says, walk on your hands and all problems are solved.”
    The hot towel was on now, so Abbott heard only a blur of sound. He came out of the chair grinning, and told Hannah Santana that one o’clock at the office would be right—just about right. They cared a great deal for him, something that could be seen by the way they helped him into his jacket and coat when the horn sounded outside.
    As he got into the coupe next to his wife, he reflected that what was known in old New England terms as a store-bought shave did more for him than a drink. He moved his huge bulk against her, a very small woman with bright eyes, a tilted nose, and a freckled face, until she said:
    â€œCrush me and wreck the car.”
    â€œI try to show affection—”
    â€œI’m grateful, Elliott.” She said; “You will be careful of what you say tonight? It’s no better for George than for you.”

9. T hey were old friends, however, and this eve ning reflected it. As far back as college—which was Amherst in a time that was already like a dream, another epoch and another world—one of the professors, which one Lowell could not remember, had spoken about friends to the effect that one did not collect them. This was troublesome to an undergraduate who had more friends than most, and because it was troublesome, the epigrammatic conclusion of what he then considered an old man, it remained in his mind for a good while. Later on, through his own experience, Lowell came to the decision that some men have two friends, some have one, but that most have none. It took him many years to realize consciously that his own very essential loneliness was shared by almost every man he knew, and being incapable of a considered cynicism, he retreated further into himself. His wife, Lois, knew this and also sensed that it was the result of certain fears, although what those fears were, she could not say. In any case, she recognized Elliott Abbott for what he was worth to George and to herself too.
    Their friendship had come into a good maturity during the past five years. They were children in Clarkton, growing up together and together in college, and then they had gone