I knew this terrain well enough to follow the historical evidence with the skill of an Indian scout. That last task, finding a mate sophisticated enough for a triangle, was one Crawford failed in, wounding everyone pretty badly. Gardner, furthermore, was, like me, very demanding. With uncanny timing, I'd been dumped just as I was at the point in the narrative where Gardner's friend dumped her. Now, a number of red flags need to be hoisted at this point.
History is too important to be written any other way.
The more uncertain and precarious the present, the more we . . . But the historian who guards that door, if he or she can be neither activist nor novelist, cannot go to the other extreme and try to be a telephone. Nor is this a new thing. Adams buried his own emotions, his extreme hopes . . . His behavior for may years was controlled by those feelings, which only experience and success at last softened and overcame. . . .