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student. They seem to have a better idea of why they’re going to college.’
    That was heartening. I wondered again how it was going to feel, seeing those nineteen-year-old faces surrounding me. ‘I’ll probably be a mother figure,’ I said ruefully.
    Barbara whooped. ‘Believe me, Nickie,’ she gasped. ‘
No one
is going to think of you as a mother figure.’
    ‘What’s all the merriment?’ asked a voice behind me. I started, then twisted in the chair to look.
    A man had stuck his head through the gap left by the partially open door. Now he looked as though he felt extremely foolish. ‘I’m sorry, Barbara, I didn’t know you had anyone in here,’ he apologized.
    ‘Come all the way in, Stan, and meet Houghton’s newest sophomore-and-a-half,’ Barbara invited.
    The man smiled a little shyly and edged into the room. He was a few years older than Barbara, whom I’d placed at around thirty-five. His neat brown beard was well salted with white and his face was seamed. He managed to look comfortable with himself.
    As Barbara performed introductions (his full name was Dr Stanley Haskell), I got the firm impression that the two were a couple. They shared the ease that comes of intimacy and long association; and Barbara seemed not the least disturbed when his eyes stayed glued to me.
    They were obviously going out for lunch together. I quickly thanked Barbara for her time and gathered up my papers. Since Dr Haskell was going to be instructing me in Chaucer (at eight o’clock Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays), I told him I’d see him in class and took my departure, my heels tap-tapping again down the stairs.
    As I pulled the Chevrolet cautiously out of the parking lot, I spotted the two English professors at a stoplight at the edge of the campus. They were laughing. The sun was shining. I beamed idiotically to myself. Ah, love!
    Mimi’s narrow driveway led around to the back of the house, where it formed a wide apron, affording room to turn around; but she’d asked me to leave the car out front, since she meant to use it. I parked across the street from the house. The yard sloped up from the sidewalk, so I had to climb steps up to the yard, and then more steps up to the wide porch that girdled three sides of the house.
    Panting a little from the heat and the stairs, sweating like a pig, I flung open the front door with that silly smile still pasted on my face – and there stood Cully.
    . . . I was fourteen again. A tall, thin, black-headed boy, a lofty senior in high school, slipped into the chair opposite mine at the Houghtons’ dining table. Hazel eyes summed me up and dismissed me.
    ‘This is Mimi’s brother, Cully,’ Elaine Houghton had said proudly. Mimi kicked me because I was gaping like a fool. I was abruptly sick, stricken with first love; and those light-brown eyes with little green streaks were utterly cool when they rested on me . . .
    Mimi wasn’t in the living room to kick me now, so I did the job myself – mentally, of course. Cully’s eyes were just as cool now, though the rest of him had changed a little. He was still very tall and too slender, but a little gray streaked the black hair of his head and mustache. There were a few wrinkles at the corners of those eyes. His cheekbones and arched nose jutted a little more sharply; the parentheses from nose to mouth were deeper.
    ‘Hello, Nickie,’ that mouth said calmly.
    ‘Hi,’ I said, and slung my notebook down on one of the couches. ‘Where’s Mimi?’ Charm and grace, that’s me.
    ‘She and Alicia Merritt are in the kitchen planning the party.’
    ‘Alicia! What party?’
    ‘Your party,’ he said, and relaxed enough to smile faintly.
    Now that was interesting. Cully had been very tense.
    ‘Mimi just decided she wanted to celebrate your arrival and have a housewarming at the same time,’ he continued.
    We stood in uneasy silence for a moment.
    ‘By the way . . .’ He hesitated for an awkward length of time, and I stared.