old woman.”
“I’m glad you found her so,” she said, as if she had had otherkinds of experience with Mrs. Bradshaw. “Well, I suppose I’d 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 get-togethers 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 periodof 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. Hisgood looks were rather gentle and melancholy, the kind that excite maternal passions in women. Though