me for a minute, Mr. Archer.'
She went into the next room, where filing cabinets stood like upended metal coffins, and came back with a folder which she opened on her desk. There wasn't much in it.
'I see,' she said more or less to herself. 'She's been admitted provisionally. There's a note here to the effect that her transcript is on the way.'
'How long is provisional admission good for?'
'Until the end of September.' She consulted her desk calendar. 'That gives her nine days to come up with a transcript. But she'll have to come up with an explanation rather sooner. We don't look with favor on this sort of deception. And I had the impression that she was a straightforward girl.' Her mouth turned down at the corners.
'You know her personally, Dean Sutherland?'
'I make a point of contacting all the new girls. I went out of my way to be useful to Miss or Mrs. Smith- Kincaid. In fact I helped to get her a part-time job in the library.'
'And the job with old Mrs. Bradshaw?'
She nodded. 'She heard that there was an opening there, and I recommended her.' She looked at her watch. 'She may be over there now.'
'She isn't. I just came from Mrs. Bradshaw's. Your Dean lives pretty high on the hog, by the way. I thought academic salaries were too low.'
'They are. Dean Bradshaw comes from a wealthy old family. What was his mother's reaction to this?' She made an impatient gesture which somehow included me.
'She seemed to take it in stride. She's a smart old woman.'
'I'm glad you found her so,' she said, as if she had had other kinds of experience with Mrs. Bradshaw. 'Well, I suppose rd better see if Mrs. Smith-Kincaid is in the library.'
'I could go over there and ask.'
'I think not. I had better talk to her first, and try to find out what's going on in her little head.'
'I didn't want to make trouble for her.'
'Of course not, and you didn't. The trouble is and was there. You merely uncovered it. I'm grateful to you for that.'
'Could your gratitude,' I said carefully, 'possibly take the form of letting me talk to her first?'
'I'm afraid not.'
'I've had a lot of experience getting the facts out of people.' It was the wrong thing to say. Her mouth turned down at the corners again. Her bosom changed from a promise to a threat.
'I've had experience, too, a good many years of it, and I am a trained counselor. If you'll be good enough to wait outside, I'm going to try and phone her at the library.' She flung a last shaft as I went out: 'And please don't try to intercept her on the way here.'
'I wouldn't dream of it, Miss Sutherland.'
'Dean Sutherland, if you please.'
I went and read the bulletin board beside the information booth. The jolly promises of student activities, dances and gettogethers and poetry clubs and breakfasts where French was spoken, only saddened me. It was partly because my own attempt at college hadn't worked out, partly because I'd just put the kibosh on Dolly's.
A girl wearing horn-rimmed glasses, and a big young fellow in a varsity sweater drifted in from outside and leaned against the wall. She was explaining something to him, something about Achilles and the tortoise. Achilles was chasing the tortoise, it seemed, but according to Zeno he would never catch it. The space between them was divisible into an infinite number of parts; therefore it would take Achilles an infinite period of time to traverse it. By that time the tortoise would be somewhere else.
The young man nodded. 'I see that.'
'But it isn't so,' the girl cried. 'The infinite divisibility of space is merely theoretical. It doesn't affect actual _movement_ across space.'
'I don't get it, Heidi.'
'Of course you do. Imagine yourself on the football field. You're on the twenty-yard line and there's a tortoise crawling away from you toward the thirty-yard line.'
I stopped listening. Dolly was coming up the outside steps toward the glass door, a dark-haired girl in a plaid skirt and a cardigan. She leaned on the door for a moment before she pushed it open. She seemed to have gone to pieces to some extent since Fargo had taken her picture. Her skin was sallow, her hair not recently brushed. Her dark uncertain glance slid over me without appearing to take me in.
She stopped short before she reached Dean Sutherland's office. Turning in a sudden movement, she started for the front door. She stopped again, between me and the two philosophers, and stood considering. I was struck by her faintly sullen beauty, her eyes dark and blind with thought. She turned around once more and trudged back along the hallway to meet her fate.
The office door closed behind her. I strolled past it after a while and heard the murmur of female voices inside, but nothing intelligible. From Dean Bradshaw's office across the hall the heads of departments emerged in a body. In spite of their glasses and their foreheads and their scholars' stoops, they looked a little like schoolboys let out for recess.
A woman with a short razorblade haircut came into the building and drew all their eyes. Her ash-blonde hair shone against the deep tan of her face. She attached herself to a man standing by himself in the doorway of the Dean's office.
He seemed less interested in her than she was in him. His good looks were rather gentle and melancholy, the kind that excite maternal passions in women. Though his brown wavy hair was graying at the temples, he looked rather like a college boy who twenty years after graduation glanced up from his books and found himself middle-aged.
Dean Sutherland opened the door of her office and made a sign to him. 'Can you spare me a minute, Dr. Bradshaw? Something serious has come up.' She was pale and grim, like a reluctant executioner.
He excused himself. The two Deans shut themselves up with Dolly. The woman with the short and shining haircut frowned at the closed door. Then she gave me an appraising glance, as if she was looking for a substitute for Bradshaw. She had a promising mouth and good legs and a restless predatory air. Her clothes had style.
'Looking for someone?' she said.
'Just waiting.'
'For Lefty or for Godot? It makes a difference.'
'For Lefty Godot. The pitcher.'
'The pitcher in the rye?'
'He prefers bourbon.'
'So do I,' she said. 'You sound like an anti-intellectual to me, Mr. --'
'Archer. Didn't I pass the test?'
'It depends on who does the grading.'
'I've been thinking maybe I ought to go back to school. You make it seem attractive, and besides I feel so out of things when my intellectual friends are talking about Jack Kerouac and Eugene Burdick and other great writers, and I can't read. Seriously, if I were thinking of going back to college, would you recommend this place?'
She gave me another of her appraising looks. 'Not for you, Mr. Archer. I think you'd feel more at home in some larger urban university, like Berkeley or Chicago. I went to Chicago myself. This college presents quite a contrast.'
'In what way?'
'Innumerable ways. The quotient of sophistication here is very low, for one thing. This used to be a denominational college, and the moral atmosphere is still in Victorian stays.' As if to demonstrate that she was not, she shifted her pelvis. 'They tell me when Dylan Thomas visited here--but perhaps we'd better not go into that. _De mortuis nil nisi bonum_.'
'Do you teach Latin?'
'No, I have small Latin and less Greek. I try to teach modern languages. My name is Helen Haggerty, by
