While Bebb is celebrating this, perhaps his most far-reaching spiritual coupe, Antonio is pitched even further into depression. Any enthusiasm that he has gleaned from the revival movement is short-lived, and his English lessons are tinged with bleakness. He is finally devastated by news that Tony and Sharon have resumed their affair – his nephew having moved back into the house where it began several years earlier. His decision to retreat to Gertrude Conover’s centre in Princeton yields little comfort, as he discovers Bebb embroiled in a battle with a professor of history, Virgil Roebuck, whose atheistic rants are disrupting the preacher’s meetings.
