The best of them kept silent to do a last service to the Party, by letting themselves be sacrificed as scapegoats--and, besides, even the best had each an Arlova on his conscience. They were too deeply entangled in their own past, caught in the web they had spun themselves, according to the laws of their own twisted ethics and twisted logic; they were all guilty, although not of those deeds of which they accused themselves. There was no way back for them. Their exit from the stage happened strictly according to the rules of their strange game. The public expected no swan-song of them. They had to act according to the textbook, and their part was the howling of wolves in the night.... Where there is freedom of choice, the disillusioned one follows one of three courses: needing an outlet for the forces which originally took him to the Party, he engages in leftist, non-Stalinist activity; ricocheting violently in the opposite direction, he aligns himself with the extreme Right; or exhausted, he sinks into a melancholy, nostalgia-tinged apathy. Rocco de Donatis throws himself into the struggle of the peasants for land. Frederick Wellman and Elsie McCabe lie with virtuosity in the service of Senator O’Brien. Lannie Madison retreats into neurosis. The causes of the disenchantment vary. Glenn Spotswood makes his break because he is interested in men as men rather than as pawns in a game. Rocco’s point of departure is the discovery of Siberian labor camps. Both of them, however, suffer somewhat the same aftereffects. There is a feeling of loss, the sensation that a platform has been knocked out from under them.