Solar [antikvár]

He belonged to that class of men - vaguely unprepossessing, often bald, short, fat, clever - who were unaccountably attractive to certain beautiful women. Or he believed he was, and thinking seemed to make it so. And it helped that some women believed he was a genius in need of rescue. But the Michael Beard of this time was a man of narrowed mental condition, anhedonic, monothematic, stricken. His fifth marriage was disintegrating and he should have known how to behave, how to take the long view, how to take the blame. Weren't marriages, his marriages, tidal, with one rolling out just before another rolled in? But this one was different. He did not know howT to behave, long views pained him, and for once there was no blame for him to assume, as he saw it. It was his wife who was having the affair, and