From the Head of Zeus

by NOLAN MILLER

1

JOHN day WELLS before the came College in on opened. the afternoon The day train, coach a was crowded with students. He sat among them, anonymous, making a halfhearted attempt to read and an energetic, more successful effort to protect the Gladstone he had brought from home in Boston. About him surged the undergraduate mass, coagulative and peremptory. Outside his window passed the flat land of Ohio. The September browns were livened by faded greens and, in country back yards, spots of chrysanthemum yellow and red.

The thin, long-legged girl who called his name on the station platform at New Messina was ugly — yes, the ugliest child he had ever seen. And she had not a trace of the homeliness that is called “ interesting.” Her bones were big and conspicuous, the skin covering them dewy and pale. Her hair, horsy red, in coarse braids, was tied with blue ribbons. Her teeth wore a wet gold wire.

“How did you know who I was?” asked Wells. The child hitched up her crumpled brown skirt, tucked in her shrunken sweater.

“I’ve got the car,” she said, and picked up his bag. “Why, I looked up your picture in the office.” “In Dean Smith’s office?”

“ Well, I had to know what you looked like. Father said — Oh, maybe you don’t know. Dean Smith is my father.”

With careful recklessness, she backed the car. They whirled into the busy, faded main street of the town. “ I’m Gretchen Smith.”

“Aren’t you pretty young to be driving a car?” asked Wells. The look she turned on him was so seriously mature, so faintly reproving, that it was he who felt childish.

“I’m thirteen,” she said seriously. As though that would not be a fact sufficient, she added, “Mr. Howland — he’s the mayor — gave me a special license.”

She was a very grave child, Wells decided.

The Smith house was of a kind familiar to him, the comfortable, slightly worn, dusty, book-andpicture-crowded faculty residence that he had taken tea in, had had consultations and quiet, endless, literary parties in as a student — a bedroom upstairs, with a closed door, that was the professor’s study, much of bare floors, a few good but worn Turkish rugs, flowered crash drapes, a sepia water stain in the tub, the tinkle of a catarrhal faucet in the washbasin. His room had two windows exchanging cool, garden-scented breezes through billowing curtains. In the back yard a moss-tinged tennis court, rather hummocky, and at the side of the garage, rows of tomato plants juggling ripening fruit.

“There are towels in the top bureau drawer, I think,” said Gretchen. “Oh, here’s Mother.”

“Hello, Mr. Wells.”

Mrs. Smith was older than he had expected — bobbed gray hair, short, stout but not awkward, sweetly placid, rather pretty. He liked her at once. Sensible and intelligent and unexcitable.

“There’s a front room you might like better,” she suggested.

“No, I like this — it’s very nice.”

“We’ll move in a more comfortable chair. Anything you particularly like to eat? We’ll have dinner in about an hour.”

Dean Smith was a very pleasant man. Field, history. Hobby, archaeology. The College had given him a sabbatical two years before; the Smiths had taken the time in Mexico and he had enjoyed a fine winter, pottering around. There were serapes on the dining-room walls. Mrs. Smith was proud of the blue handmade glass.

“Have to show you the stuff I dug up,” said Smith graciously. “I gave it to our Museum.” He had been at the College a long time. And now he was Dean. In a way, he and the College were of the same substance.

The meal was good, the coffee excellent.

“You’re going to like it here,” said Dean Smith.

Wells nodded, almost happily.

“What shall I call you?” asked Mrs. Smith. “Jack? Do your friends call you Jack?”

“ Please.”

The tips of Dean Smith’s cars touched graying, reddish-brown hair. His brow was wide, unaged — he would be the kind of man who would talk rather than write, think rather than act; who would want a chair to rest in, not to ride, pleasures to enjoy, not to pursue.

“I call Mary ‘Smitty,’” he said. “She hates it.”

“My maiden name was Smith, too,” she said.

Gretchen slipped away from the table. She was a huge eater and talked very little while eating. Wells was gratified to observe that he was able to ignore her.

Suddenly a wonderful thing happened.

The gaunt, old-fashioned grand piano that almost blocked the archway leading to the sunroom clearly and precisely began to speak Bach.

He could see Gretchen’s back, board-straight, bone-strong, and her bare yellow elbows. The music rack was bare.

“Why,” said John Wells, unable to reject amazement,— honest, intense amazement, — “it’s a Bach Partita.”

“Oh, do you play?” asked Mrs. Smith.

“Not like that, I don’t. Why — will she play all of it?”

Mrs. Smith looked amused. “I’m afraid she will.”

“But she’s very good. Isn’t she?”

Mrs. Smith nodded.

“ Is she — She studies piano?”

“Just for herself—she picks out things. I don’t think she’ll take up music in a professional way, if that’s what you mean.”

“Well, she could, I think.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Smith, “I know.”

“B-but,”John Wells stammered, “you don’t seem to think it’s unusual at all.”

“It’s not unusual for Gretchen, you see.”

He noticed a grave air about Dean Smith. And perplexity. As though gravity, confused by words, could not find a voice.

“Gretchen, he said, not lowering his voice, “is a very unusual girl.”

“Does Gretchen know she’s so unusual?” Wells asked.

“Yes, she knows it. Or, rather, she’s got used to it. We’ve tried to make her see it’s normal for her. We finally had to let her quit school four or five years ago — high school. All the other kids resented her — made her feel uncomfortable. She hasn’t any real girl friends now — just very small ones that she plays with, entertains. When she was small herself, it wasn’t so bad. This year we’re letting her enter college.”

“They let her in?”

“With examinations.” Mrs. Smith laughed. “I’m afraid Professor McCullough — he’s in charge of admissions I’m afraid he let Gretchen dazzle him.”

2

Introduction to English Literature. 8.30, M.W.F.

First row, industrious in bare solitude, Miss Schafer with her stub of pencil, her block of pink notepaper. Wells’s every word caught in the gray web of Schafer’s trailing handwriting.

Second row — the C level. Was this always true? The mulish, unspeaking line of full, healthy faces, the cloddish brains, the round, firm flesh, concentrate of milk, lettuce, and mashed potatoes— how wide this C, how shallow.

Rows three and four, an assortment, vaguely like the bottom layer of chocolates in a candy box: Korman, one of the editors of the Sentinel, breezy in style and hasty — Wells was sure he’d covered only half of The Old Wives’ Tale for his last weekly report. Parr, who slept, who sometimes groaned in his erect and bloodless sleep. Miss Wilkinson, bovine, cheerful, with a square hand question-marking the rear blackboard — “But Mr. Wells, what docs he mean? Says here, ‘Hold to the low lintel up.’” Levin, somber, meditative, hopeless, quick to catch a joke or pun.

The first meeting of the class after the sixth-week exams was ghastly. W’ells probed brutally for reactions to the assignment in Wordsworth. “Now, Mr. Korman, what do you think Wordsworth was trying to say in Tintern Abbey?”

“ Well — I wouldn’t exactly say —”

“You’ve read it, haven’t you?”

“Oh, yes, I read it. Well, Wordsworth’s been to this Abbey before and it’s very beautiful — and he thinks it’s even more beautiful now—

“Yes. Why?”

A passing fox-red glint in the glass square of the classroom door — the second time he had seen it. Wells, his ears still cocked to Korman, waited for a recurrence of the image. Palpably, a signaling, uncertain presence out in the hall. Finally, softly, the door opened.

“Dr. Wells — I’m sorry — could I see you a moment?”

The twenty heads of the class turned, as with any interruption; the hum, the titter, the table arm of a chair creaking — Tintern Abbey was convulsively hurled to welcoming oblivion.

“Couldn’t you have waited?” Wells pulled the door shut behind him.

Gretchen, crane-like, bent down to a knee and scratched it. Then she redistributed her books. “I’m in trouble, Jack. And I just couldn’t come whanging into your class without explaining.

“My class? Are you coming into this class?”

Gretchen possessed a look of frigid composure — but the thaw was already advancing. “Old Hibbard kicked me out of English 2. Said I was wasting my time.”

“That’s not the usual thing—” Wells had to smile at the “old” Hibbard, Not five years older than himself.

“Oh, he took it up with Spence—” That was Miss Spence, Dean of Women. “She said 1 might as well begin literature.”

Wells grinned. “So you suggested my class — ”

“Don’t get stuck on yourself,” said Gretchen haughtily, then grinned. “No, she did. Really. It comes the same hour as the other. ‘

“But what about all the back reading—”

“I’ve done it. I’m right up to date.”

“How in the world — ?”

“Mary Jane Williams has been giving me assignments.” Gretchen was suddenly all tinder — little sparks of happiness starred her braids, the bridge of freckles on her upper lip, the tight gold wire on her teeth. She opened the door, and left it open for him to follow, then seated herself, still shining, books, yellow elbows, skinny brown legs, at the center of the row of the comfortable C s beside Mary Jane Williams.

From that day on, the class was transformed — it became John AA ells’s hope for the day. He knew it as he lay his ten minutes past alarm time in bed each M.AY.F. morning. He saw Gretchen at the breakfast table in the kitchen — in fact, she got breakfast for him because Mary Smith liked to sleep late. And she walked by his side down Hollister Avenue, under the trees that were growing bare, by the still green lawns where the frost made white the architectural shadow’s of the sleepy houses. They did not talk. She knew he liked his walk and his first cigarette and his silence.

Now the class was quick with life; Gretchen, always at the center, a convex mirror, broke them into two abiding camps — dumb with adoration or distorted by irritation. Since her first day, when she gave them a comprehensive, complete digest of Wordsworth’s Prelude — which none of them had read because it was not in their text — the twenty remained dazed or angry. Who had set this “going on fourteen ” carroty monster to plague their browsing souls? Not one could live the hour untouched.

And JohnW Wells could feel himself being magnificent. He began to know a kind of delirium. That girl! He was a ruined dog. She — innocently or not — had robbed the nests, had given him the forbidden taste of eggs. She had made him find joy in teaching — a grave joy that would tease him the remainder of his life.

How had she learned to do this thing?

By weight of fact, he felt himself a hero. This was a “good” class because he had shifted, as if by gears, into the realm where men are “made” under the graceful influence of others.

And this was, secretly, the power, the only powder, he had ever dreamed of— “and gladly teach.”

“What about AYells?” he could fancy students saying, as they shopped for advice in the Gym on registration days to come. “Oh, take him — take any course you can get into. He’s tops!” And, in after years, “Old Wells”—his pet gestures and phrases hoarded and fondled. “No snap, of course — and a hard marker — but, oh boy, did you learn! ”

Fantastic! That little homely chit, Gretchen, had done this. But fear was, finally, the result of a result. For behind those eyes of hers — those terrible, terrible eyes — he began to discern the wall of immutable criticism; there was something there that, either blindly or with hands most sensitive, he knew he would never be able to touch.

3

IT WAS ridiculous how, about the house, he tried to avoid seeing her, speaking to her, how much he was disturbed by her.

He was ashamed of himself. It was — ridiculous.

During the first winter months, when sifting, level snow made the Ohio landscape flatter then ever, he was in the habit of returning home from his office or the library to lie down in his room, turn on the bedlight, and read.

Usually, at this time of day, there was a great tickticking of Gretchen’s typewriter behind the closed door of her room at the end of lire hall. He was sorry not to hear her at the piano more frequently. “They’re giving her too much work to do,” he thought. “Just because she can do it — they—”

He felt guilty himself. “You ought to read soand-so,” he was always hinting. “I’d like to know what you think of him.” She suggested extra papers. To get into conversation with her, even at the office, meant that a whole afternoon whirled by without his being aware of it. This Wunderkind — funny, he thought of her neither as a child nor as a woman. How did he think of her?

One late afternoon he knocked on her door. It was a cold, almost bare room. How depressing, the unpainted student’s desk, so familiar in campus boardinghouses, the gooseneck reading lamp, its raw glare penetrating machine and paper, even the bones of her hands.

“Oh, sit down, Jack. Ashtray?”

“What are you writing, Gretchen?” Impossible to banter with her. His words seemed even a little harsh.

“I’m bothering you.”

“Not at all.” He meant it. Said it plainly as he could. In friendly fashion, he sat on her unmade bed.

“It’s silly,” said Gretchen, simply, turning to him, stuffing her hands between the woolen legs of her slacks. “But I’m trying to write the story of my life.”

He was astonished.

“Why?” he asked.

“Well, so much has happened to me — recently. I want to get it all down. It may be good to read some day.”

“You remember everything of your life, of course.”

“Yes,” she said. He believed her. “I remember all the dumb little things I used to do. But I’m more interested in the recent things. That part doesn’t seem dumb.”

He laughed. “Oh, it will. I guarantee it will.”

She was very grave. She shook her head. “I’m not so sure. You know, being in love — it’s very serious. Especially the first time. Maybe the first time is the only time.”

She spoke so casually — she looked so abjectly human — that he was touched.

“Are you in love?” So he might have asked, “Going my way?”

“Yes,” said Gretchen. “I’m in love with you.” “My God, Gretchen,” he said.

“I thought you might know.”

“Gretchen,” he said nervously, “this is a lot of nonsense. You’re too sensible —”

“Jack, you don’t mind, do you? I won’t ever embarrass you.”

“Well, the very fact that you tell me! Women —” he was not conscious he thought “women” — “women never say such things.”

“I know. And I think they’re silly. If I had a toothache, I could discuss it with the dentist. If I’m in love, why can’t I discuss it with — with the man I’m in love with? You must know more about it than I do. Haven’t you ever been in love, Jack?”

“No,” he said. It was the truth. “No, I’ve never been in love.”

“Jack, you’re afraid of women, aren’t you?”

His essential, masculine fiber was bruised, “ What an idea!”

“You’re afraid of the wrong kind of women, I mean.”

“What’s this all about?”

“ What are you waiting for, Jack? I want to know. What kind of woman are you looking for? Tell me.”

“I want a woman who can cook, and sew, and scrub-and look beautiful when I want something beautiful to look at.”

“I can cook, she said. “Any fool can learn how to —” Then her face took on that solid, square look of the owl, the owl, terrified and alone in its tree, the day breaking, the merciless day that powders the eyes. “Jack, you don’t mind my being in love with you? ”

“We’ll be very discreet about it,” and he patted her on the shoulder.

But in the classroom he was no longer afraid of her questions. Look as she might like the day-struck owl, the child not a woman, he knew what lay behind her ever staring eyes. And he knew that he was touched because her love had made her weak; that because of her love he could, if he liked, trample her to a smudge.

4

NICE Christmas, Jack?”

He was back, after his holiday. The winter afternoon was pale. He and the Smiths sat in the living room. The roast pork to be supper draped the air of the slightly untidy room. Dean Smith wore the dark-green house-coat Mary and Gretchen had persuaded Wells to buy at Brooks Brothers in Boston.

“ It was nice,” he told them. They seemed really interested. “Got to the symphony twice — God, how I had missed it.”

“We ought to take Gretchen to Cleveland sometime,”said Dean Smith. “She’s heard the big orchestras only on the radio.”

“Where is Gretchen?”

Mary Smith sighed. “Skiing—or trying to. That thickheaded uncle of mine — he lives in New Hampshire—sent her skis for Christmas. Now Gretchen’s having quite a time.”

“It’s good for her,” said the Dean. “Doesn’t ever get enough exercise — especially in winter.”

“I can’t imagine skiing in this kind of country,” said Wells.

“Well, it can be done. Gretchen says it’s the most fun she’s ever had. They take the car out — take turns pulling each other around on the country roads. Seems Miss Beechy has skis too.”

“Miss Beechy?” said Wells curiously. Miss Beechy was the young domestic science teacher at the College. He had taken her out once or twice to the movies, to a dance, late in the fall, at Russell Point. Miss Beechy’s permanent home was here with her family in New Messina.

“Yes,” said Mary Smith, “Gretchen seems to have hooked herself a new friend. They’ve been palling around a lot lately.”

“Good thing,” said the Dean, one of his legs finding comfort over the arm of the sofa, “though I think we ought to have a quiet moment of pity for Miss Beechy.”

“That’s not being kind to Gretchen,” said Mary. “Poor Gretchen. She can’t help it.”

“Before Gretchen was born,” the Dean told John Wells, “we used to call her our ‘experiment.’ I guess we hardly realized what we were getting into — having any kind of child.”

“It’s lucky we were so old,” said Mary Smith, comfortably, “or we might have gone right on, having a whole house full of Gretchens! When she was three, Gretchen criticized the arrangement of the furniture, and I knew what we were in for.”

“Do you think Gretchen’s unhappy—being so unusual? ” Wells asked the question abruptly.

“No,” said Mary Smith, positively, “she’s loo smart, too sensible to be unhappy. Dan and 1 have argued that point. Only the very dull or the very brilliant are really happy, I think. Personally, I look on Gretchen’s isolation with horror. She hasn’t a friend — she can’t ever have an understanding friend. Never in this world.”

“But she won’t be put out by it a whit,” said the Dean.

“What about Miss Beechy?”

Mary Smith smiled. “Oh, I think Gretchen’s just studying Miss Beechy.”

“As much as one would like to think,” wrote Gretchen in her ugly, barely decipherable handwriting in her final examination bluebook, “that in all of Wordsworth’s poems he is autobiographical, that his poems are revelations of the soul, that naked mind which rests eternally in each of us, one knows that here, in Wordsworth’s lines, as in the lines of any other literary artist, great or small, profound or trifling, the ‘inner man,’as we ourselves are conscious of it, is not, can not be disclosed.”

In the quiet of his office, John Wells drew a deep breath. He continued reading.

“The ‘literary mind’ is a wary thing. It is too artful, too dissimulating, too aware of the beautiful — more aware of things that ‘must be’ than of ‘things done,’ By this I mean that the literary artist never, never can face Truth. Truth is too terrible — too ugly. The literary man’s intelligence is great intelligence, but it must always be secondrate — though, apparently, for most of us, his kind of ‘truth’ is sufficient. Of pathetic necessity, we have to make it do. That which is the real Truth never reaches paper, never can be formed into words, written or spoken.

John Wells turned his face to the window, but he did not see through it. He was very tired. But because he was tired, he was determined to plow through all the bluebooks. And he read them all. Then he read Gretchen’s bluebook again. Started at the beginning, and did not give up until he finished. He found one or two commas to put in — he marked out a capital letter or two. Then he gave her A.

It was seven o’clock. He had worked right through the dinner hour. Although he was still tired, he did not feel hungry.

The walk home in the freezing air put a stomach back into him, and a line ringing warmth in his chest. It was cold, cold.

“Well, here you are,” said Mary Smith. “Your dinner is in the oven. Say, there was a telephone call for you. Gretchen took it — and she’s upstairs.”

“It can wait,” he said. “I’m hungry — really hungry.”

After eating, he sat downstairs, racing through the newspaper. Then he remembered the call, He bounded upstairs.

“Hey, Gretchen — did you take a call for me?”

She came to the door in her baby-blue dressing gown — why was she so fond of that insipid color?

Her lips were pale.

“Jack, the bluebook,” she said painfully, “was it all right? I — I’ve been so worried about it.”

“Goose! It’s A, of course.”

“Really? Really! Oh, I’m so glad — so glad. I tell you, it’s the only thing I ever wanted — wanted-”

“Don’t be sentimental.” He felt a bit frightened of her again. He would have to be brutal. He lowered his voice, hoping she would lower hers. “Now what about this telephone call?”

“ Look — come here a minute. ”

On her bed, laid flat, its silky sheen catching the gooseneck light, was a long dinner dress. A little cape, a bunch of feathers. Silver braid at the skirt hem. It was a beautiful rose color. Very fine.

She took it up gingerly and held it to her shoulders. “See — how does it look?”

“Why, wonderful— is it yours?”

“ A friend gave it to me — it’s an old one. Does it look so old?”

Grace Beechy! He remembered that dress. Senior Prom tonight. Lord, he’d almost forgotten it.

“Jack, that was Grace on the phone. She’s very suddenly got a cold. She can’t go to the Prom.”

“Poor kid! Say! Is that on the level?”

“Of course it is. Don’t you believe it?”

“Well, what are you doing with this dress? What kind of crazy idea have you got in your head? I’m glad I don’t have to go out tonight — it’s as cold as Greenland.”

“You wouldn’t go — not even stag?”

“Of course not. Look here, Gretchen. You’re not being silly, are you?” He almost added, “At your age?” But, of course, that was ridiculous. There was no age for the ageless.

“Why,” he continued, “that would be — a scandal! My taking a — taking you to a Prom, People — ”

“Oh, I know.”

“But you did think it, didn’t you? You thought — you got ready for it, didn’t you? You had one crazy moment when you —”

She laid down the dress.

“You’re quite mistaken,” she said. “Really you are. Isn’t it a lovely dress? You aren’t going. That’s all there is to it. Some day I’m going — and that’s all there is to it. And when it happens, I’m going to wear that dress.”

He caught her chin in his hand.

“You really want to go?”

“Some day, of course.”

He looked extremely gratified — a far happier look was on his face than any he had ever given her for her most brilliant recitation.

“You’re getting some sensible ideas, these days.”

“Grace Beechy—”

“Grace Beechy is giving you some very sensible thoughts,” he said again, ironically.

“I’m learning quite a lot from her, I think.”

“I hope you learn what to do when you find, some day, that she’s taught you how to break your own heart.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re going to be — planning things like this — you’re going to be very miserable some day.”

“Oh, I don’t think I shall.” She said it very solemnly.

He went outside. Such damnable sensibility. If this were intelligence, intelligence at the highest what, then, was his? And what was he?

“I believe she’s right,” he said to himself. “I think she knows. She’s smart enough even to know that — which includes everything, I guess.”

5

THE following September, when John Wells again rode the train from Cleveland to New Messina, he found the wheels clacked merrily; the miles disappeared as through a sieve. One or two heads nodded his way as he took a seat. Then several students came over to talk to him.

What did he think of the new pre-induction course? Was his Comparative Lit. course a twoor a three-hour? Any foreign language requirements? “Look at my hands,” said Miss Wilkinson — the same Miss Wilkinson of the back row and the goodnatured, naïve questions. “Look at ‘em. Yes, sir, I’ve been pitching hay.” Did Dr. Wells know for sure if the WACS were taking over all the dorms? See any good plays in New York, Dr. Wells?

It was Dr. Wells’s opinion that there were no good plays in New York.

Dean Smith set the car horn squawking as Wells, bags in hand, moved from the crowd on the station platform.

“You didn’t need to waste gas on me,” Wells protested, but grinned.

“Looking good,” the Dean told him, shaking his hand vigorously.

“I’ve been trying to keep in trim,” said Wells. “You never know. I might get called any time now.”

“How do you feel about the Army?” asked the Dean curiously.

“I don’t—feel. I’ll let my draft board have feelings.”

“ We’re picking up Smitty at the Super Market,” said the Dean. “There she is.”

“Jack!” Mary Smith handed him her big sack of groceries, then kissed him.

“Here, here!” Smith said.

“I love making gossip,” said Mary. “I always take any opportunity I can.”

“How’s my girl friend, Gretchen?”

“Wait till you see her, I think she’s grown a foot! And filled out a little. She’s had a wonderful summer. You remember that Tilton woman — the one who wears clothes made out of monk’s cloth, and those terrible beads? Well, she came over, beginning of July, and begged Gretchen to go to camp. Mr. and Mrs. Tilton are counselors at this place on Lake Erie —she wanted Gretchen for nature study and stuff like that with the little Cleveland slum kids.”

“So Gretchen went?”

“And had a marvelous time! Made friends with the Tilton boy — that’s Roger. He’s sixteen. And Roger — well, Roger’s smitten on her. I believe he really is!”

Wells, despite himself, felt a grim look fastening on his face. But he tried to smile.

“And Roger?”

“A big, hulking, stoop-shouldered kid—but nice.”

“What’s Gretchen going to take at college this term?”

Dean Smith spoke. “Gretchen’s not going to college this fall.”

Wells sighed. “Maybe it’s a good thing — she’s already so advanced.”

Mary smacked her hands together. “There! I told you, Dan, he’d see it. Jack, I want to kiss you again. Gretchen’s thought it all out — but she wanted your opinion. You see, she’s made up her mind she could just as well take a year at the high school.”

“High school!”

“Roger,” she said, “Roger thinks he might make the football team this year. So — So —”

6

IT WAS too fine an evening to stay indoors. And it was not the kind of evening when one could read. And tomorrow there would be that familiar excitement, the lines of students waiting outside South Hall to see McCullough. The English majors corning down to the office for chats. The salute to the flag at noon outside Randall.

About ten o’clock the Dean said he’d like to walk down to Heim’s and get some ice cream. Mary said she’d go with him. After they left, Gretchen came out and sat beside him in the porch swing. She had — for her—been spending her evening in a most amazing way: praying mantis at the telephone.

He could see the differences in her. A touch of lipstick. The gold band gone from her teeth. Cut with bangs, and long at the back, her hair did something for her face. It gave her a face and it gave her checks and it gave her eyes. She was still not pretty. But she was interesting. She was fourteen and she looked sixteen.

“Was all that — devotion to Roger?” Wells asked, jerking a thumb toward the telephone. He had had a large dose of Roger at the dinner table. And a larger dose of Roger which he had not been able to understand. “Yes, Rog.” “No, Rog.” “Oh, really, Rog? That’s square!” “On the up and up, Rog?” All from the praying mantis, kicking off her loafers, sprawling on the living-room sofa.

“It was Roger twice,” said Gretchen, “But it was also Peg Loomis and Sally Vanderkloot — and Sally’s cousin from Norwalk. I don’t know her yet.”

“Well.”

“We’re all going over to the Reservoir tomorrow if Roger can get the car. And tomorrow morning Peg and I are going down to the Bon Ton and prowl. You should see Roger. He’s only sixteen and he weighs almost one-seventy-five!”

They were silent a moment. Wells felt her stir uneasily.

“You think it’s all — all right, don’t you, Jack?”

“Yes,” he said. “Of course, I’m disappointed that you’re not coming into the Comparative Lit. class. I rather counted on that.”

“I’m not ready for it,” she said. “There’s something I remember in John Stuart Mill’s autobiography —”

This child! Quoting to him from Mill!

“He says that in his education some pleasures were enjoyed too soon. I — I don’t want some pleasures too soon.”

The swing chains began to creak.

“ You’ve taught me a lot, Jack — do you know it?”

“Have I?”

“You have — you’re the best teacher ever! Taught me things that can’t be marked.”

“Oh, but you can be marked.”

She seemed amused. “What’s my mark, Jack? Up to now?”

“A, of course.” He had never given any grade so certainly.

“You must he very careful — ” she said.

“What?”

“You must be very careful — when you meet Roger—not to let him know — not to let him know he’s being marked.”

“Of course not,” he said.