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deal.’
    â€˜What are you going to do when you want that drink? —just pray?’ and Mike—his old friend Mike from last Spring sitting in, formidably dry: ‘How about the gradual building up over months? How do you plan to fill all that time?’ Other questions, too, and he answered them but he sounded uneasy and he felt even more uneasy than he sounded, and he was amazed when, after the meeting broke up at quarter past five, Gus took him aside in the corridor and actually said, ‘I’m counting on you to help me some, Alan? Do you think you can?’
    â€˜Christ, Gus,’ Severance was overwhelmed, ‘I would not like anything better in the world, if I thought I could.’
    â€˜We’re all sick in our degrees around here,’ Gus said warmly, ‘but we can help each other even where we’re blind ourselves. You’re a nice guy, Alan. I’m counting on you, then.’
    Severance was too choked-up to speak. He went to his room and sat unnerved till the gong went for dinner. ‘How’s it going?’ Charley asked, looking up as they clattered downstairs together. ‘Terrific,’ said Severance. ‘I’m not so keen on myself but Gus thinks I may be able to help him with the others.’
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    Though not exactly a street-angel-house-devil like his grandfather (according to his grandmother, who hated men), Severance was a man of intermittent and irreconcilable virtue. One of his heroes was some priest once read about, who ‘treated everyone with the utmost kindness: if he favoured anyone it was the most unfortunate, and especially those who rebelled.’ Severance liked that, it was just how he treated his students, and its coincidence with how he thought he ought to treat his students—and not only his students but his colleagues’ students, for Dr Severance was much applied to, his office was a sort of problem-clinic on Tuesday afternoons from three to four-thirty or six—gave him deep satisfaction: there was one corner where he was okay. He gave himself credit, vigorously. His wife he did not see in either of these positions—though he recognized daily and with bitter remorse her misfortune in having married him and he sympathized (secretly) with her rare up-on-her-hind-legs revolts against his tyranny. He was very much afraid of her and he gave her a hard time. She often complained that any damned student, especially
if female, had his automatic undivided attention sooner than she did, that he was a louse, that he did not care anything about her. None of this was true, he considered. He thought about her night and day, for instance her problems and inadequacy as a teacher (for she had finally finished her training and was teaching the 6th grade in a suburban school, her first job ever). It was true he felt some contempt (carefully concealed, and he was ashamed of it) for her cowardice in not standing up to her students, of whom she was mortally afraid, every third morning at breakfast she was half-in-shock at the prospect of facing them again. On the other hand, how could he expect her to cope with aimless brutes? One of her boys, a bright little fellow named Drake, had broken a little girl’s arm in class one day; another had hoisted an atlas heavy as a boulder and slammed it down on the cranium of the little girl sitting in front of him, he might have given her concussion; the Generation Gap was real, Severance’s blood boiled, he was fertile with devices against these monsters, only he deplored her helplessness, doubted if she had any vocation. He looked at her with rage, seated on the edge of his hospital bed that evening, and said, ‘Where the hell were you? I called four times.’
    â€˜Did you? I’m sorry, Alan. I was so exhausted from the six days’ strain I just went to bed right after dinner, even before Rachel did, taking the phone off the hook so I wouldn’t be wakened by one of