She had meant to turn Tim Flannery away, and continue to nourish her self-pity and self-hate, when suddenly she had realized that she wanted someone near, anyone kind and good, and Tim Flannery was both. She had invited him inside, barely listening as he spoke of the difficult trip around the country, the untriumphant return, the President’s decision to fight back. The moment that he had lapsed into silence, she had bared her soul to him, determined to expiate her guilt. First haltingly, then with a torrent of words, she had revealed herself to him as she might to a father confessor. She had divulged everything, her weeks-ago drunken babblings to George Murdock, her next-day regrets lulled by her utter and reassuring trust in George, and she had gone on this way, unable to prove it was George who had given over so many of the President’s secrets to the enemy, but adding that she was almost certain of it, else why had the enemy so quickly knighted him with a reward?

“I meant no harm to the President, I swear on my mother and father I didn’t,” she had told Flannery. “But I’m still one of the ones who has hurt him most, I know that, I’m not denying it. What’ll I do, Tim? I can’t go back to my office now, I can’t face him, and even if I could, he’d probably throw me out, and have every right to.”

“Well, Edna, this is one of those times I can’t speak for him,” Flannery had said, “and I really-well-I don’t think it’s my place to advise you what to do next. It depends on how you feel about the President and-well-how you feel about Murdock. After all, George is the man you’ve been planning to marry. I wish I could help you. I can’t. But I believe you didn’t mean to do any harm. I believe that.”

After he had gone, she had felt better but was no less confused. Flannery had reminded her, as the modest sparkling crest of tiny diamonds on her finger reminded her, that she was engaged to be married. To whom, then, did a girl owe her loyalty-to a boss she had sold out (not that these truths about him would not have been uncovered elsewhere, anyway), or to a fiancé who had sold her out (if he had done so, which he probably had, but then, perhaps, he had felt he was doing it for both of them, and it was not wrong because he loved her so)?

She had slept on it, and wakened with it, this insoluble dilemma, and she had spent hours playing out little fantasy games, with herself the heroine.

In one version, she had married George (for his explanation had been satisfactory), and she belonged, and she had dozens of other married lady friends, and they had teas and played bridge, and she marketed and cooked for George, and dutifully attended the PTA meetings, and they had marvelous summer vacations each year, in Palm Beach or Atlantic City or Provincetown, the young and happy marrieds, she a doting mother and the wife of the eminent columnist.

In a frighteningly different version of her fantasy, she had refused to marry George (for his explanation had not been satisfactory) and, discharged by the President, or losing her position after the President’s impeachment conviction, she had been forced to take one of those gray mouse-on-the-wheel jobs in the Commerce Department or the Pentagon, and she was a spinster and would always be one, gulping her lunches in dank basement cafeterias where the thick crockery was never quite dried, going to Hecht Company sales every Saturday with the other “girls” who had taken to dyeing their graying hair, collecting her cheap reproductions from the National Gallery of Art, spending summer vacations with her parents outside Milwaukee, growing fat and resentful and old alone, alone, and bitterly remembering that she’d had her chances (one chance anyway) and turned her back on them (well, on it), and garrulously recollecting (even for those who had heard it before) that she had once been the personal secretary to two Presidents of the United States, one killed, the other crucified.

She had awakened late this morning fortified to act out her last deception in the week of lies. George Murdock, she had almost convinced herself, could not be at fault, and if he had been, it might have been a slip of the tongue like her own, and even if it had not been that, but had been intentional, there was nothing that George could have given to the enemy forces that would have damaged the President more than he had already been damaged by himself. So, that was settled.

But then, at one o’clock sharp, she had turned on the television set, as everyone in America was doing, meaning to watch only a little of it out of curiosity, expecting to see no more than a tedious enactment of the kind of quasi-technical or irrelevant or senile verbiage you came across in the Congressional Record every morning. Instead, she had found herself absorbed in the trappings and opening grandeur of a drama that gripped her as much as any historical drama by Shakespeare that she had ever seen. And then there was that horrible Zeke Miller spouting his foul calumnies, and her numbed absorption had become inflamed to the point of sickening wrath. And then there was Nat Abrahams, making public the invisible fifth Article of Impeachment, and her wrath had melted into sickening shame.

It was all of that week behind her, and the morning and early afternoon of this day, that she had relived and dwelt upon as she splashed across the White House north driveway to the entrance of the West Wing lobby.

Closing her soggy umbrella, shaking it twice, she went into the small hall, and, avoiding the Reading Room straight ahead, filled with so many journalists with whom she was acquainted, she turned to the open doorway that led into the cramped pressroom.

To her surprise, the narrow work enclosure was abandoned except for a single reporter in the rear, tilted back in his green chair, swallowing from a soft-drink bottle while he studied a yellow sheet of teletype. She took in the room that she had so infrequently entered. A cardboard sign, tacked to a square pillar, read: WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENTS. There were aisles to her left and right, and in the center of the room were the two rows of reporters’ cubbyholes, back to back, each slot separated from the adjoining ones by perforated, soundproof plywood dividers. She hesitated, wondering which one was the right one.

Then, with determination, she went up the left aisle, between the green wall-unevenly decorated with framed photographs, many faded or yellowing, of former press regulars and Presidents-and the line of nine cubicles on her right side. Reaching the sixth cubicle, peering into it as she had into the others, her eye caught a typewritten notice Scotch-taped upon the blue center partition. It read: “Poachers Stay Out! Private Property Of Miller Newspaper Association. R. Blaser. G. Murdock.”

Shoving the chair aside, she searched around the battered standard typewriter, telephone, spindle with its sheaf of impaled handouts, and reference books. At last, she located a memorandum pad upon which was imprinted, Quickie-Note. Tearing off a sheet, she found a pencil stub and wrote, “George: Sorry, it doesn’t fit. Edna.” Then, easing the engagement ring off her finger, she placed it atop the note that she had written, and then she hurried out of the press quarters.

Approaching the Reading Room, returning the White House policeman’s hearty greeting, she intended to turn left and duck into the corridor that led past Flannery’s office to her own office. But the entrance to the press secretary’s corridor was blocked by a crowding, heaving, elbowing mass of correspondents, and in their midst, his rust-red hair tangled, his tie yanked down from his open collar, in shirt-sleeves and suffering harassment, was Tim Flannery.

The reporters milling around him were noisy, vociferous, and profane. Although Flannery kept raising a hand to silence them, his tormentors continued to wave their pads and shout questions: “Tim, is the President watching the impeachment on television?… Hey, what did he think of Zeke Miller’s opener?… Did Dilman himself get his counsel to inject the Negro issue?… Say, Tim, how is he taking it?… What about a statement? What time is he making a statement?”