“Europe?”
“None of your business. But I will tell you I won’t go back there: they’ve gone quite mad too. In Madrid I pretended to be a Catholic and I watched them put Cavites up before firing squads. Of course our people, despite persecution, are having a wonderfully exciting time with passwords and peculiar college fraternity handclasps and so on.” She collected her gloves and handbag from the floor where, as usual, she had strewn them. “Well, now good-by.” She gave me a kiss; then she was gone. I never saw her again.
2
Events moved rapidly. I took to bolting my bedroom door at night and, during the day, I was careful always to have one or another of my assistants near me. It was a strange sensation to be living in a modern city with all its police and courts and yet to fear that, in a crisis, there would be no succor, no one to turn to for aid and protection. We were a separate government within the nation and the laws did not reach us.
The day after Clarissa had said good-by, Paul appeared in my office. I was surrounded by editors but at a look from him and a gesture from me they withdrew. We had each kept our secret, evidently, for none of those close to us in that building suspected that there had been a fatal division.
“I seem to be in disgrace,” I said, my forefinger delicately caressing the buzzer which I had built into the arm of my chair so that I might summon aid in the event that a visitor proved to be either a bore or a maniac, two types curiously drawn to enterprises such as ours.
“I wouldn’t say that.” Paul sat in a chair close to my own; I recall thinking, a little madly, that elephants are supposed to be at their most dangerous when they are quite still. Paul was noticeably controlled. Usually he managed to cross the room at least once for every full sentence; now he sat looking at me, his face without expression.
“I’ve seen no one since our dinner except Clarissa,” I explained; then I added, earnestly: “I wonder where she plans to go. She didn’t....”
“You’ve almost wrecked everything,” he said, his voice tight, unfamiliar in its tension.
“I didn’t want to,” I said, inaccurately. I was at the moment more terrified than I’d ever been, either before or since. I could get no real grip on him: the surface he presented me was as formidable, as granitic as a prison wall.