332
PARTISAN REVIEW
whatever to do with her parents. Consequently, Wilhelmina's ride
downtown in the subway was one in which she was sickened by her
sense of guilt, while Mrs. Gold spent New Year's Eve in tears, tears
interrupted only to renew her quintessential criticism of her husband,
who quietly damned the day that he had decided to send his daughter
to the university.
And at this time, Shenandoah and Nicholas travelled crosstown
in a street-car, standing up in the press and brushing against human
beings they would never see again. They continued their argument
which on the surface concerned the question, Should Nicholas go
to a party where he would for the most part be a stranger? This was
a type of the academic argument, since the street-car slowly wen1
crosstown, bearing the young men to the argument's conclusion. Yet
the dispute had come to the point where each young man, oppressed,
cited and bore in mind only the other's faults of character, and
Shenandoah was becoming aware that the other passengers were
listening in amazement to their virtually ontological discussion of
character when the street-car arrived at their destination, and they
dismounted. Immediately they saw Wilhelmina on the street-corner,
angry at her mother, Shenandoah, and chiefly herself. But her anger
vanished as he arrived and there was no longer any reason to be
impatient.
Nicholas, Wilhelmina and Shenandoah entered the remodeled
tenement in which Grant lived just as the drizzle of rain turned into
a downpour.
"Hello," Grant cried loudly to them from the top of the stair
after the antiphonal buzzes and the shoving of the door. He shouted
down the stairwell at them from sheer love of the act of greeting.
But this was complicated by another habit, just as frequent, that of
crying down a question in a troubled or virtually mystified voice.
"Shenandoah?" he cried down the stairwell, as if some pressing
problem had been uttered. And when the question was answered by
Shenandoah in an unclear voice, unclear because he was always
uneasy in formal matters, Grant then shouted back a greeting, a greet–
ing in which his voice sometimes broke or grew hoarse, \Vhile his
visitors ascended, unseeing, and unseen, and unable to shout back at
him because they did not enjoy his temperament or his pathological
excess of energy.
As soon as the visitors arrived at the head of the fourth floor,
they found that Grant, Martha, and another couple, Oliver Jones
and his wife, Delia, were in their coats and about to depart. Grant
