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Besides this, and almost worst of all, Wilkie seemed to be losing interest in his friends and family. For over a month he hadn’t been to the faculty club, and he wouldn’t let her ask anyone to dinner. Last week when the children were home for Thanksgiving he had had little to say to them. He had less and less to say to Jenny too; also, for nearly a month he had not suggested making love.

Clearly something was wrong. And that being so, it was Jenny’s responsibility to correct it. Perhaps, she had thought at first, her husband was ill but didn’t realize this, because he had hardly been sick a day in his life. He had always refused, for instance, to acknowledge colds: when one showed signs of wanting to attach itself to him he ignored it until, defeated, it slunk away.

A month ago Jenny had persuaded Wilkie to have a medical checkup—first on general principles, then resorting at last to her usual last resort: the claim that it would make her feel better. Grumbling about the waste of time, reiterating his belief that people who weren’t ill should stay away from doctors, Wilkie accompanied her to Dr. Felch’s office and was pronounced to be in excellent health for a man of his age. Prompted by Jenny, he admitted that he occasionally got up at night, but declared that he saw nothing wrong with this; he refused to accept the term “insomnia. ”

Like almost everyone in Convers, Dr. Felch was somewhat in awe of Wilkie Walker, the town’s most famous citizen. More for Jenny’s sake than his patient’s, perhaps, he wrote a prescription for what he called a “muscle relaxant,” which Wilkie afterward refused to take. The trouble with most people today, he told his wife, was that their muscles were too relaxed, not to say atrophied.

Though Wilkie seemed to have forgotten the whole episode, one phrase Dr. Felch had used kept running through Jenny’s head: “a man of his age. ” Wilkie’s age was now seventy. Not for the first time, she recalled the uncomfortable conversation she had had when she first brought him home to meet her parents.

Wilkie clearly hadn’t noticed the slight hesitation in their welcome, and would have been surprised to hear what was said when his wife-to-be confronted her mother later in the kitchen.

“Darling, I do like him,” Jenny’s mother had insisted. “And of course I realize he’s brilliant. He was wonderfully interesting about those South American bats. And I can see he really loves you. But—” She turned on the water in the sink, sloshing away the rest of the sentence, if any.

“But what?”

“Well. He has been married twice before, that always ... Under Jenny’s hurt, resentful stare, her voice faltered. “And then ... the age difference. You’re barely twenty-one, and Wilkie Walker is forty-six, almost my age. I always think of what my mother said once: If you marry someone much older, you don’t ever quite grow up. And when you’re forty-six, Wilkie will be seventy. An old man. ”

Jenny refused to listen. Wilkie Walker was not like other people, she declared. He had more energy and endurance and enthusiasm than most of her college friends.