“Oh, I do love Cambridge,” she said. “I do love these houses, and all the trees. Who do you suppose lives there?”

“Some old maid, I expect.” She felt the unresponsiveness to this game they usually played together with enthusiasm.

“I know, George,” she answered something he had not said, “only, let’s wait till we’re settled. Then we can really talk. Forget it for a few moments, darling”—she turned her face, looking at him gravely—“it’s not that I don’t know,” and she slipped her hand through his again, so it was all right. But after that, they both felt a little stiff and walked fast as if they were hurrying to a shelter.

Once Pen stopped to smell leaves burning somewhere in a distant garden and sighed. “Sometimes I feel as if I were saying good-bye to everything every moment. It’s awful to be a senior. I didn’t know how awful it would be.”

This brought back to George his recent doubts—would he be here next year himself? But he would not start off on this with Pen. It was too shameful. What did it matter whether he got his instructorship or not? And he swore suddenly under his breath.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

The bright lights of the Midget were ahead of them now. But this was home, unlike the dormitory, and they walked in boldly, looking around to see who was there, hailing a couple in another booth and then sitting down opposite each other for that long look of arrival, what Pen meant by being “settled.”

“You look awful, George darling. What have you been doing?”

“Nothing”—he frowned—“drinking—thinking—hating those lousy little Groton boys who don’t bother to show up for English A.” But he didn’t smile, just ordered two dark ales in a businesslike way and lit Pen’s cigarette and his own.

“Well, you certainly have a champion in Alice Evans.” Pen, he knew, was trying to get him to smile, but he wouldn’t fall for it. “She bores us to tears with tales of how wonderful you are, and when Towser came to lunch,” she went on rather nervously, “the poor guy had to listen to how wonderful you were till he actually got quite cross.”

There was no rise in George, susceptible though he was about his teaching, catching at the crumbs of praise, like any other of the teaching fellows who lived in a strange state of isolation, sinking or swimming on their own, and as touchy as prima donnas.

“You don’t need to, Pen,” he said in a tired voice. “Not tonight.”

“Sorry, I guess I got off on the wrong foot. I guess I’m scared,” she said, puffing at her cigarette as if she had never smoked one before, then suddenly stamping it out as if it tasted bad. “I guess this has been a pretty tough time for you, George. I’m sorry, dear.”