(It was even suspected that one or two of the other academic awards really should have gone to Marya Knauer: there was no one in the class who came close to her academically, not even Robbie Ducharme, who had been admitted to Cornell, not even Warren Maccabee, who was so dull, so slow, so plodding, so unfailingly thorough, Marya’s classmates naturally believed him superior to them all.)

A few days after the commencement speech—in fact it was five, Marya counted them—Emmett came by to see her. Without an explanation for having failed to call, without even a word of praise for her performance. If Marya’s defiant speech on the “repellent” nature of American conformity had stirred him, or if it had angered him, or disappointed, he never said; but then he was a fairly reticent person and his long silences often made Marya uneasy. What are you thinking about so hard, Marya sometimes asked, jabbing him playfully in the ribs, turning her nervousness into a joke (this had become such a habit with her, done with such high spirits and bravado, Marya never questioned what lay behind it), are you angry with me? She would lean against him, make a show of feeling slighted, left out, hurt; if the circumstances were right she’d even kiss him, burrow her face against him as if they were lovers. And Emmett would laugh in exasperation and say, Marya, other people aren’t like you—just because we’re not talking it doesn’t mean we’re thinking secret thoughts.

So it astonished her that Emmett Schroeder should want to marry her. That he should say, with that air of subtle reproach that greatly flattered her, We love each other, we should get married, it’s time to get married—isn’t it?

Marya wondered if he could be serious. If he would really marry her. (What about his parents? Mrs. Schroeder had never said an unkind word against Marya, so far as Marya knew, but she could judge by the woman’s manner of greeting her—that prim little twisted smile—that she didn’t like her at all.) Wilma said she didn’t trust the Schroeders, and just the look of Emmett—taller than Marya by a good five inches, wide in the shoulders, with thick dark hair and broad Slavic cheekbones and a spare measured smile that cut through you like a knife (so Wilma complained) announcing, I am better than you, my family has more money than you—just the look of him offended her. He’d been in the marines and he was twenty-six years old (and Marya was only seventeen) and his father had built his construction business up out of nothing so naturally he was tightfisted and suspicious and wouldn’t want a Knauer marrying into the family. . . . So Wilma fussed, speculated aloud. “And he isn’t Catholic, Marya,” she said (meanly, teasingly), “doesn’t that make a difference?”