“What a time we’re going to have.” Clarissa was beginning to recover. “I’ll bet there are a million letters by morning and Paul will be doing a jig.” “I hope this is the right thing, Clarissa. It would be terrible if it weren’t.” “Of course it’s right ... whatever _that_ means: if it works it’s right ... perfectly simple. Such conceptions are all a matter of fashion anyway. One year women expose only their ankle; the next year their _derrière_. What’s right one year is wrong the next. If Cave captures the popular imagination, he’ll be right until someone better comes along.” “A little cynical.” But Clarissa was only repeating my own usual line. I was, or had been until that night on the Washington farm, a contented relativist. Cave, however, had jolted me into new ways and I was bewildered by the change, by the prospect ahead. 2 That evening was a time of triumph, at least for Cave’s companions. They arrived noisily. Paul seemed drunk, manically exhilarated, while Iris glowed in a formal gown of green shot with gold. Two men accompanied them, one a doctor whose name I didn’t catch at first and the other a man from the television network who looked wonderfully sleek and pleased and kept patting Cave on the arm every now and then, as if to assure himself he’d not vanished in smoke and fire. Cave, still dressed in his dark suit, was mute. He sat answering questions and replying to compliments with grave nods of his head. He sat in a high brocaded chair beside the fire and drank tea which Clarissa, knowing his habits, had ordered in advance for him. After our first burst of greetings at the door I did not speak to Cave again and soon the others left him alone and talked around him, about him yet through him, as though he had become invisible ... which seemed the case when he was not speaking, when those extraordinary eyes were veiled or cast down, as they were now, moodily studying the teacup, the pattern in the Aubusson rug at his feet. I crossed the room to where Iris sat on the wide couch. The doctor, in the chair close to her, snuffled brandy and said, as I joined them: “Your little book, sir, is written in a complete ignorance of Jung and all those who have come after him.” This was sudden but I answered, as graciously as possible, that I had not intended a treatise on psychoanalysis. “Not the point, sir, if you’ll excuse me.... I am a psychiatrist, a friend of Mr Himmell’s” (so this was the analyst to whom Paul so often referred) “and I think it impossible for anyone today to write about the big things without a complete understanding of post-Jungian development....” Iris interrupted as politely as possible. “Doctor Stokharin is a zealot, Gene. You must listen to him but, first, did you see John tonight?” “I did, here with Clarissa: he was remarkable, even more so than in person.”