thousand, as she turned from the phone book rack and looked up.
Powell confronted her. He was flushed and panting, his blond hair wild. She wasn't afraid; there were bright lights and people. Hate leveled her rough breathing like a glacier: 'You should have run the other way. It won't do you any good, but I would start running if I were you.'
And he looked at her with a sick-dog, pleading, near-tears expression that was so pathetically sad-looking it had to be true, and he said softly, hurtfully, -'
'Ellen, I loved her.'
'I have a phone call to make,' she said, 'if you'll get out of the way.'
'Please, I've got to talk to you,' he pleaded. 'Was she? Was she really pregnant?'
'I have a phone call to make.'*
'Was she?' he demanded.
'You know she was!'
'The papers said nothing! Nothing...' Suddenly his brow furrowed and his voice dropped low, intense. 'What month was she in?'
'Will you please get out of my-'
'What month was she in?' His voice was demanding again.
'Oh God! The second.'
He let out a tremendous weight-dropping sigh of relief.
'Now will you please get out of my way?'
'Not until you explain what's going on. This Evelyn Kittredge act...'
Her glare was acid.
He whispered confusedly, 'You mean you really think I killed her?' and saw no change in the narrow stabbing of her eyes. 'I was in New York!' he protested. 'I can prove it! I was in New York all last spring!'
It shook her, but only for a moment. Then she said, 'I suppose you could figure out a way to prove you were in Cairo, Egypt, if you wanted to.'
'Jesus...' he hissed, exasperated. 'Will you just let me speak to you for five minutes? Five minutes?' He glanced around and caught a glimpse of a man's head vanishing behind a quickly lifted newspaper. 'People are listening,' he said. 'Just come into the cocktail lounge for five minutes. What harm can it do? I couldn't 'do anything' to you there, if that's what you're worried about.'
'What good can it do?' she argued. 'If you were in New York and you didn't kill her, then why did you avoid looking at the Municipal Building when we passed it last night? And why didn't you want to go up on the roof tonight? And why did you stare down into the airshaft the way you did?'
He looked at her awkwardly, painfully. 'I can explain it,' he said haltingly, 'only I don't know whether you'll be able to understand it. You see, I felt...'-he groped for a word-'... I felt responsible for her suicide.'
Most of the booths in the black-walled lounge were empty. Glasses clinked and the soft piano dallied with some Gershwin themes. They took the seats they had occupied the night before, Ellen sitting back stiffly against the upholstered partition as though to repudiate any suggestion of intimacy. When the waiter appeared they ordered whiskey sours, and it wasn't until the drinks were in the table between them and Powell had taken the first sip of his that, realizing Ellen's intention to maintain a noncommittal silence, he began to speak. The words came slowly at first, and with embarrassment 'I met her a couple of weeks after classes began last year,' he said. 'Last school year, I mean. Late September. I'd seen her before-she was in two of my classes and she'd been in one of my classes in freshman year-but I never spoke to her until this particular day because I usually wind up with a seat in the first or second row and she always sat in the back, in the corner. Well, on the night before this day when I spoke to her, I'd been talking with some guys and one of them had said how the quiet girls were the ones who...' He paused, fingering his glass and looking down at it 'You're more likely to have a good time with a quiet girl. So when I saw her the next day, sitting in the back in the corner where she always sat, I remembered what this guy had said. 'I started a conversation with her, going out of the room at the end of the period. I told her I'd forgotten to take down the assignment and would she give it to me, and she did. I think she knew it was just an excuse to talk, but still she responded so... so eagerly it surprised me. I mean, usually a pretty girl will take a thing like that lightly, give you smart answers, you know... But she was so... unsophisticated, she made me feel a little guilty.
'Well anyway, we went out that Saturday night, went to a movie and to Frank's Florentine Room, and we really had a nice time. I don't mean fooling around or anything. Just a nice time. We went out again the next Saturday night and two times the week after that, and then three times until finally, just before we broke up, we were seeing each other almost every night. Once we got to know each other, she was a lot of fun. Not at all like she'd been in class. Happy. I liked her.
'Early November it turned out that the guy was right, what he said about quiet girls. About Dorothy, anyway.' He glanced up, his eyes meeting Ellen's squarely. 'You know what I mean?'
'Yes,' she said coolly, impassive as a judge. 'This is a hell of a thing to tell a girl's sister.'
'Go on.'
'She was a nice girl,' he said, still looking at her. 'It was just that she was... love-starved. Not sex. Love.' His glance fell. 'She told me about things at home, about her mother-your mother, about how she'd wanted to go to school with you...'
A tremor ran through her; she told herself it was only the vibration caused by someone sitting down in the booth behind her.
'Things went on that way for a while,' Powell continued, talking more swiftly now, his shame melting into a confessionary satisfaction. 'She was really in love, hanging onto my arm and smiling up at me all the time. I mentioned once I liked argyle socks; she knitted me three pairs of them.' He scratched the tabletop carefully. 'I loved her too, only it wasn't the same. It was... sympathy-love. I felt sorry for her. Very nice of me.
'The middle of December she started to talk about marriage. Very indirectly. It was just before Christmas vacation and I was going to stay here in Blue River. I've got no family and all I've got in Chicago are a couple of cousins and some high school and Navy friends. So she wanted me to go to New York with her. Meet the family, I told her no, but she kept bringing it up again and finally there was a showdown.
'I told her I wasn't ready to get tied down yet, and she said that plenty of men were engaged and even married by twenty-two and if it was the future I was worrying about, her father would find a place for me. I didn't want that though. I had ambitions. Ill have to tell you about my ambitions some day. I was going to revolutionize American advertising. Well anyway, she said we could both get jobs when we finished school, and I said she could never live that way having been rich all her life. She said I didn't love her as much as she loved me, and I said I guessed she was right. That was it, of course, more than any of the other reasons.
'There was a scene and it was terrible. She cried and said I'd be sorry and all the things a girl says. Then after a while she changed her tack and said she was wrong; we would wait and go on file way we had been. But I'd been feeling sort of guilty all along, so I figured that since we'd had this halfway break, we might as well make it complete, and right before a vacation was the best time to do it. I told her it was all over, and there was more crying and more 'You'll be sorry' and that's the way it ended. Couple of days later she left for New York.'
Ellen said, 'All during that vacation she was in such a bad mood. Sulking... picking arguments...' Powell printed wet rings on the table with the bottom- of his glass. 'After vacation,' he said, 'it was bad. We still had those two classes together. I would sit in the front of the room not daring to look back. We kept bumping into each other all over campus. So I decided I'd had enough of Stoddard and applied for a transfer to NYU.' He saw the downcast expression on Ellen's face. 'What's the matter?' he said. 'Don't you believe that I can prove all this. I've got a transcript from NYU and I think I've still got a note that Dorothy sent me when she returned a bracelet I'd given her.'
'No,' Ellen said dully. '1 believe you. That's just the trouble.'
He gave her a baffled look, and then continued. 'Just before I left, towards the end of January, she was starting to go with another guy. I saw-'
'Another man?' Ellen leaned forward. 'I saw them together a couple of times. It hadn't been such a big blow to her after all, I thought I left with a nice clean conscience. Even felt a bit coble.'
'Who was he?' Ellen asked. 'Who?'
'The other man.'
'I don't know. A man. I think he was in one of my classes. Let me finish.
