By Fred’s father, for instance: “Well, she’s certainly good-looking. And she seems like a very warm-hearted kind of girl. Those photographs she took in the Mexican slums show a lot of feeling for her subject; you know what she thinks, all right.” The photographs were of Mexicans in an upstate New York farmworker’s camp, but Fred had given up trying to correct this error, typical of his father, who prefers to locate all social disagreeableness at the greatest possible mental distance.

Or as Joe and Debby had put it: “Pretty far out, those disco pictures of Ruth’s. You can see she really knows her stuff technically.” “She’s obviously a high-energy kind of person.” “That was a really unusual dress she was wearing, with the red embroidery and all those mirrors, Albanian or whatever it was.” “She reminds me of some of my students from New York. We were suprised she grew up in a place like Corinth.”

Translation: Roo is too emotional, too political, too arty, too noisy, and too Jewish. As it happens, Joe himself is Jewish, but from a very different tradition: Princeton-trained, scholarly, retiring.

Many of Fred’s graduate school friends, and most of his relatives, are obviously relieved that Roo is, as one of them put it, “out of the picture.” They assume or at least hope that she won’t reenter it, but will remain in the more far-out and slummy world of her own photographs. Fred’s mother, on the other hand, very much wants them to get back together. Maybe for sentimental and conventional reasons: he can remember her saying in another context, with a placid pride, “You know, darling, there’s never been a divorce in my family.” But it is not only that she wishes to preserve this record; his mother had taken to Roo from the start, though they could hardly be less alike: Roo so arty, noisy, etc., and Emily Turner such a lady, her tastes so elegant, her voice so well modulated.