It is a dull afternoon in the sorority house and Dorothy is trying to
make up her mind to study; but she isn’t having much success. In fact,
the idea is so unattractive that she doesn’t waste more than half a
minute trying. Everybody has gone to the last game of the season across
the river, and Dot didn’t go because she has used up all her week-ends.
Oh, well ... Sunday afternoon and five hours before her date. Nothing
left to read. Washed her hair yesterday—you mustn’t do that more than
once a week. Manicured her nails before lunch. Plucked her eyebrows,
darned her stockings—oh, bother Sunday afternoon. And there is a theme
due on Tuesday, but that’s a long time and anyway you write better
themes at the last minute. Oh, glory, there’s the phone. What if just
once it could be someone unexpected?
“Miss Dormer? This is Donald Banks, from Los Angeles. I have a letter
for you from Genevieve Reed. When I left I mentioned that I might be
coming through here and she thought——”
“Why, any friend of Jen’s—why, of course. Can’t you come over?”
“I’d very much like to. When would it be convenient?”
“Any time this afternoon. I think I’m busy tonight, but if you’d like to
come over now or pretty soon it would be all right.”
Well! Oh, well, he’ll probably be a mess. Jen never mentioned him.
Haven’t heard from Jen lately, though. It wouldn’t be like her to send
up a wet smack.
No, you aren’t a wet smack at first glance, anyway. Interesting looking.
Lean and distinguished; something like Lewis Stone, if not quite so
tall. How funny of you to think that the sitting-room is really a place
to sit—surely no one else spent all afternoon on that horse-hair sofa
since the Dean of Women was a pup. If you were one of the boys you’d
know enough to suggest going out. But it is rather fun at that.
“Oh, you mustn’t think,” she protests, “that you have to go just because
it’s so quiet. We’re allowed to have visitors indefinitely on Sunday.”
Laugh. “You’re tired, though. I remember Sunday afternoon at school from
my own experience. Thank you, and—I may see you quite soon again? Not
only, I assure you, because my time in your city is so limited.”
Ooo, what a funny way to talk! “Certainly.” It is queer, how hard it is
to keep from getting an accent like that too, while she talks to him.
“Yes, I’d like to see you again before you leave. It doesn’t happen to
be a very—busy time for me just now.”
“How fortunate! I don’t want to interfere with your studies. Can’t we
have dinner this evening?”
“Oh—why—yes, thank you, I’d like to. At six-thirty? Good-bye.”
Oh, well, Tom ought to excuse her for an out-of-town friend. That is
perfectly legitimate.
“Hello. Alpha Belt house? Is that Tom? Well, listen, Tom? I hope you
won’t be perfectly furious because I really can’t help it, but it’s this
way——”
* * * * *
A co-ed is a well-protected person, in spite of what may be read in the
newspapers about her freedom. She is so hemmed in by public opinion—not
the opinion of the outside world, but that of her own public, the
campus—that it is with a distinct sense of guilt that she associates
with anyone so foreign as an out-of-town visitor, be his appearance ever
so distinguished. Not that Dorothy isn’t thrilled as well as
apprehensive. If she dared, she would even have dined in the roseate and
familiar publicity of Ye Kandy Shoppe, stared at by her friends and
causing a poorly concealed flurry of gossip. But you would be puzzled by
Ye Kandy Shoppe, and perhaps dissatisfied with the food. That is why you
proceed solemnly through the menu of the Imperial Hotel Dining-room,
sherbet-on-the-side and all, surrounded by the younger married set of
the town, with an occasional drummer or a professor’s party.
“Well, yes, I see that you know Genevieve quite well,” you are saying.
“Much better than I do. It’s perhaps the only fault that I can find with
my work—the lack of real social contact. Going and coming as I do, I
must resign myself to being the picturesque figure; oft forgotten.
Interesting, perhaps, but so occasionally!” Smile.
“But doesn’t your work keep you in one place at a time pretty much?”
asks Dorothy. “I thought it took at least six years at a time to build
bridges. Surely there are people there—in Abyssinia, or wherever you’re
going next?”
“People? My dear child, you’ve been going to the movies. The natives are
really dark—much more so than you seem to suspect. Of course once in a
while you do find people, and if they are people at all, you understand,
they mean much more to you than they would here, at home. That mode of
life has given me a distressingly intense way of taking my friends, I
find. You children with your great circles of acquaintances wouldn’t
understand my attitude.”
“I might,” she says, eagerly. “Once I spent a summer camping—in
Maine—with just three other people, and I certainly was glad to get
back to town. I was so sick of them!”
“Yes, that might give you some idea of it. But don’t misunderstand me. I
wouldn’t give it up for anything. After all in the face of certain
things, what do people matter? I give you my word—” here your face
grows intent as you finger a fork; you seem to have forgotten Dorothy
and the dining-room “—a man gets pretty close to the fundamental reason
for things, out there. So close that he is perilously near to discovery.
What keeps him from going farther? Sometimes he goes too far. Sometimes
a boy is sent back home just for going too far—for discovering, or
thinking he has discovered.... Fever? Insanity? Truth?”
Dorothy shivers. The tawdry dining-room is forgotten in dark imaginings.
Slimy twisted vegetation, slow streams of oily water, houses built on
stilts, lifted from the swamp.... Or the monotonous sun of the desert;
the undulating, glaring floor of sand with one heroic little clump of
tents....
“Would you care to dance?” You have come out of it. She smiles, rather
late, and nods. You dance the way they do in those places in Europe, she
thinks—slow and romantic, not hopping all over, like Tom.
“When do you start back again?”
“Well, I’m not sure. I won’t know until I get back to New York. They
keep these things quiet, of course—international policy, I might say.”
For the first time, your smile is for her; a personal thing. “I have a
very definite regret that my visit is so short. It’s an unaccustomed
feeling. The last time I saw civilization—let’s see, it must have been
four years ago—I was positively glad to go back. Where do they keep you
young girls? Are you always at school? Ah, well—thank education for our
salvation!”
It is difficult to imagine you at a movie, she thinks. You go, however,
and sit through a news weekly, a very old domestic comedy, at which you
laugh quite surprisingly hard, and half a problem picture before you
give it up.
“I say,” you suddenly announce, “stupid of me not to have thought of it
before. Simply driving somewhere would be better than this. Or have you
a rule about cars and that sort of thing?”
“I suppose we must have, but no one ever pays any attention to it.”
You must drive a good way before the Sunday traffic is at last left
behind.
“You drive well for not being used to the city,” she ventures.
“It’s good fun,” you explain. “Much more dangerous than the life out
there. And you mean to say that you do a lot of driving? In streets like
those in town? Brave girl!”
Safe from the eyes of any university official, she takes a cigarette.
Your silence and proximity are very thrilling; there will be a lot to
tell the room mate when she gets back. Or perhaps it would be better not
to say too much—to act as if this sort of out-of-town friend is to be
expected from a background like Dorothy’s. She is rather different than
the usual co-ed, anyway, she thinks comfortably. More interesting
friends, on the whole. Of course these little boys are all right when
you have nothing else....
Stop the car on the edge of the Hawk Bluff, which in the sober light of
common day looks out over a not-very-far-down golf course, but which now
hangs over mysterious abysses.
“Dorothy,” you say.
It has come at last; she knows it and turns to you with the fatal
feeling of one for whom circumstance has been too strong. And then
nothing happens for a minute.
“You are a lovely child,” you say. Then, very quickly, draw her to you
and kiss her on the brow. And then drive home through the quiet night.
Anyway, it is quiet until you reach town and the boisterous returning
students.
Home again, an hour before she has to be. Stand in the light-speckled
gloom of the verandah and say farewell.
“So very, very nice of Jen. I’ll never forget it. Something to remember
when I go back.... Lovely child.”
And without even another kiss on the brow you are gone.
Does Dorothy call up the Alpha Delt house to arrange for a malted before
she goes to bed? Or does she go to her room and sit there in the dark,
thinking?
She goes to her room quite thoroughly, as it were, seduced. After all,
this is the most subtle method of them all.