Chapter 8 begins on March 19, 1938. Charity has just gone into the hospital to deliver her baby. Sally tuts that she has lost the “baby derby,” but the couples remain optimistic. Soon, Larry receives word that a publisher has picked up his novel. Larry’s novel is deeply personal.

The friend also inadvertently caused their deaths in an aviation accident. However, Larry is yet aware of the double-sided character of this resentment as he himself profits from this tragedy. He muses, “Yet now, having held in grief and resentment, and evaded thinking too much about the episode that changed my life with the finality of an axe, here I am exalted by having made use of it, by having spilled my guts in public” (109). The others greet Larry’s achievement with joy and praise, throwing an impromptu party in his honor. At the party, Larry tentatively begins to indulge the feeling of success, but these intimations of self-satisfaction are broken when Sally goes into labor.

Chapter 9 is a brief set of recollections as Larry anxiously waits for Sally to deliver. The baby is breech, meaning that Sally must endure a difficult and dangerous delivery, and Larry describes himself as being “imbecilic with shock, fatigue, and fear, and close to passing out” (118). Charity and Sid are with them, providing what comfort they can. At an indistinct point, Larry learns that the delivery was a success; although the baby girl has a broken arm, she and Sally are resting. As Larry reaches exhaustion, he has greater and greater trouble tying the events together in his mind. To lift Larry’s spirits, Charity muses about names, admitting that she and Sally had decided on the name Lang, to which Sid and Charity offer the joking hypothetical: “Why didn’t Sally think? We had a plot to marry her to David [their son] if she turned out female. What kind of name is that going to leave her? Lang Lang. She’ll sound like a streetcar” (123).

Following the birth of Larry’s daughter, Chapter 10 details more of Larry’s anxiety about his profession. It is a tense time at the university, with promotions being announced and decisions being made about whether to allow certain faculty members to stay on. However, given that it is 1938 during the Depression, there are few positions available. Although Larry has taught a full course load while writing stories and a novel, he does not receive a promotion. Instead, he is allowed to stay only for a temporary appointment. Similarly, Sid is only given an extension. He and Larry are indignant, but their situation is desperate. As Larry notes, “Hard times are instructive and humbling. I can’t forget that I have a birth-damaged daughter, just coming around, and a still-recovering wife, and that medical expenses and the girl we have hired to help Sally have eaten up most of our savings” (126). These extensions only grant up to six years. 

They find out together and are loath to tell their wives. When they decide to have a boat ride to ease their worry, an accident happens, and they all must bail out, their wives included. This emergency eclipses the husbands’ bad news, and all four gain a new feeling of closeness borne from simply surviving. Larry asserts, “We liked those two from the minute of our first acquaintance. After that shipwreck afternoon we loved them both, sometimes in spite of themselves and ourselves” (141).

In Chapter 11, Larry and Sally separate, and Sally leaves to visit relatives. Larry remarks that this is the longest they have ever been separated; they exchange letters. Larry is productive during this time and quickly writes a novel, but he misses Sally terribly. In addition, he begins to become suspicious of Sally and Sid. Yet at the same time that Larry worries about Sally being alone with Sid, he himself kisses Alice, the wife of a colleague. 

With his work still partially unfinished, he resolves to drive up to visit Sally and the Langs. While on the road, he has a close call. He arrives exhausted in the middle of the night, and his memory of the incident fades. It is not until the morning that he final feels at home, back with those he loves.

Chapter 12 details the two couples’ idyllic life together at the country home in the Northeast. For Larry, the days have a refreshing regularity: “We did our hours of constructive work, all of us, from eight to eleven-thirty: Sid in his study, Sally and Charity with their babies and house plans and shopping and village volunteerism, I in the moving shade of the treetops on the guest-house porch” (153).

Swimming, tennis, and general relaxation occupy their days. At dinner, prominent guests visit, and there is vigorous and serious talk. Later, Sally and Larry are introduced to the family. Larry’s professional troubles are on his mind for these introductions, yet he is proud of his nascent literary life as he works on his next book. It is here that he decides to make writing a career, despite the great risks involved.

Chapter 13 describes a walking trip that Larry takes with the Langs. The uncertainty in their professional lives makes the trip unusually tense. Larry remarks on this tension in his recollections: “Since this story is about a friendship, drama expects friendship to be overturned. Something, the novelist in me whispers, is going to break up our cozy foursome” (163-64). He points to his own real, though misplaced, anxiety regarding Sid and Sally: “[W]hat more plausible than Sid Lang, a rampant male married to a somewhat malleable wife, should be tempted by Sally’s softer nature. I have already dropped a hint of that by recalling my uneasiness about their skinny-dipping” (164). However, what transpires on the trip is completely different than Larry’s expectations. The Langs offer a place for Sally and Larry to stay while Larry is writing his next novel. With this good news, however, comes an emergency: Sally becomes mysteriously weak and faint, an illness revealed to be polio. The coincidence is not lost on Larry, who cynically notes, “Good fortune, contentment, peace, happiness have never been able to deceive me for long. I expected the worst, and I was right” (195).