It was like trying to write with Dunlop, the department chairman, sitting on his shoulder, chain-smoking and making nasty cracks. Nothing he did was quite good enough, nothing he wrote was as felicitously phrased as it should have been, no idea or opinion was really all that startling or original. Yes, what he'd said to Meg he still thought was true—the peace and tranquillity of Arcadia (the name still amused him) made it easier to concentrate, to work without interruption. But the silence around him, the absence of class bells and students in the hallway, had also made that inner voice just that much easier to hear. There was nothing to drown out the insidious dissenting, the carping that went on and on and on, and that left him wondering, in the solitude of the study, if he was really cut out for the career he had chosen. Or the career that, for want of any other particular ambition, had chosen him. Meg's faith in him made it even worse. It made him feel like a fraud. When she'd come into the study a few days before, to tell him about the party they were invited to that night, she'd asked him twice if she was interrupting his work; she treated his dissertation with a respect that he himself found it hard to give.
