For the truth was, as Mulcaby had to acknowledge, pacing up and down his small office, that in spite of all the evidence he had been given of the president’s unremitting hatred.He found himself hurt by the letter—wounded, to be honest, not only in his self-esteem but in some tenderer place, in that sense of contract between people that transcends personal animosities and factional differences, that holds the individual distinct from the deed and maintains even in the fieriest opposition the dream of final agreement and concord.He had not known, in short, that the president disliked him so flatly. It was the usual mistake of a complex intelligence in assessing a simple intelligence, of an imagination that is capable of seeing and feeling on many levels at once, as opposed to an administrative mentality that feels operationally, through act.Like the most people of literacy sensibility, he had been unprepared, when it came down to it, for the obvious a blunt, naked wielding of power. And the face that he had thought himself prepared, he bitterly reflected, was precisely a measure of the abyss between the Maynard Hoars of this world and the Mulcahys.
The anomalies of the situation afforded him gleam of pleasure—to a person of superior intellect, the idea that be or she has been weak or a foot in comparison with an inferior adversary is fraught with moral comedy and sardonic philosophic applications. He sat down at his desk, popped a peppermint into his mouth, and began to laugh softly at the ironies of his biography: Henry Mulcahy, called Hen by his friends, forty-one years old, the only Ph.D. in the literature department, contributor to such prestigious magazines as the Nation and the Kenyon Review, Rhodes scholar, Guggenheim fellow, father of four, fifteen years teaching experience, yet having the salary and rank of only instructor—an “unfortunate” personality in the lexicon of department heads, but in the opinion of a number of his colleagues the cleverest man at Jocelyn and the victim, here as elsewhere that is the ruling passion of all systems of jobholders.