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I? I probably won’t be at commencement tomorrow, and after that…”
    “We won’t be doing any writing this summer,” Debbi said, with that same grin.
    “I just wanted you to know,” Louise said slowly, “that I’m glad you’re going, even if I like you.”
    “I know you are,” Joan said. There was a small silence, and then she went on. “I mean, I can see where you’d be glad to have—” She stopped, floundering.
    Louise laughed, her first genuine laugh since she had opened the door for them. “You won’t ever get out of
that
sentence,” she said to Joan.
    “Mrs. Harlowe,” Debbi began suddenly; Debbi had been thinking. “Can I ask you something? I mean, would you be offended?”
    “I don’t think so,” Louise said. Now it comes, she thought; now if I can’t carry it off, I’m through.
    Debbi searched for words, her alert, pretty face worried. “Why?” she asked. “Why don’t you and Mrs. Thorndyke and Mrs. Crown and all the others just overlook it? I mean, the students all graduate and go away and there’s no more to it. I mean, it’s not anything serious, ever, is it?”
    Please God, Louise thought, in the split second she had before she answered. “No,” she said slowly, “it’s certainly never serious—at least not for the teacher. I know that Lionel has told me about you, Joan, without ever thinking I’d mind anything so harmless as his being obsessed over one of his students. I know that Ellen Thorndyke was concerned because she thought that the girl was getting seriously involved.” Louise remembered Ellen Thorndyke’s face and thought, I could kill all these girls. “And I suppose we all feel pretty much the same way. Even though many of us aren’t really much older than you are, we’ve all lived with these men for quite a while and we know a good deal more about them than you do, only seeing them occasionally.” Keep it light, she told herself; keep it faintly patronizing. “It’s very possible, you know, for a girl your age to get herself into serious trouble—with the college, with her family—”
    “With his wife,” Debbi said. “Bill Thorndyke’s wife was so jealous she couldn’t see.”
    Louise ran her finger softly along the design in the couch cushion. “I don’t want to quarrel with you,” she said. “Ellen Thorndyke is worth the whole pack of you.”
    “But she was jealous,” Debbi said. “Dusty told us she cried.”
    I
could
kill them, Louise thought. “I hardly think that girl Dusty is any competent judge of emotions,” she said, hearing her voice go full of hatred.
    “Well, we’ve talked about it a lot,” Debbi said seriously. “We’ve decided, among the students, that none of you could see your husbands go off to an office every day without worrying about his secretary. I mean, wives just
are
jealous, aren’t they?”
    Come off it, come off it, Louise thought; in my own country I was accounted quite a killer. “You may be married yourself someday,” she said. “It’s just possible.”
    “It’s because you don’t have anything to
do,
” Joan said. “Anything better, I mean.”
    “What do
you
have to do?” Louise asked. Ellen Thorndyke was making a patchwork quilt, Jean Crown was growing orchids, Roberta Ewen had gone back to the piano. Suddenly Louise was aware that she had said all she had to say, that any more talking would destroy the handsome invulnerability she had set up for herself with such care, and she shrugged, as perfectly as Joan had shrugged a few minutes ago. “Well,” she said. “There’s no point in our arguing about it. After all, you two are leaving tomorrow.”
    She gave them the correct pause of attention to indicate that they might go. They needed no prompting—not two girls who were going to spend the summer drinking scotch on yachts. They both rose, getting out of their chairs as though they were at home and the chairs were handsome antiques. They both said “Thank you so much” in the correct