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Show One ought perhaps feel oneself obliged by these considerations to attempt a step which . . . He puts the pencil down, stares off across the little room. He has never really noticed how complete his office has become: the walls are entirely covered with bookcases, and each bookcase is now precisely filled with books, neatly aligned, all of them carefully alphabetized and entered in a little card file kept in the drawer of the desk. Robeck allows his gaze to slip slightly out of focus; he is thinking about the conclusion he has begun to write for his Defense, and he knows there is something wrong with it. But what he notices among the blurred outlines of the books which line his room is the way in which some of them stand out: hot red, chrome yellow, startling shades of green. It is an extraordinary, delightful effect; the spines of almost all his books are undifferentiated brown-gray, except for these few. He begins to understand: they are the new books, printed in the recent, garish years of textbook marketing; most of his books are half a century old. He realizes: it is an old man's library. He returns to the paper; he holds the pencil on its side, and draws a broad, irregular X through the lines he has written. He tries again: One must feel obliged by these considerations . . . But he does not finish; there is a knock at the door. Robeck can tell from the humility of the knock that it is Li H e r , his co-worker on the rat |