The honeymoon between me and the Nu Beta chapter of Chi Omega lasted about three weeks. It lasted through rush week, during which time I was still such a celebrity that I was able to pick out two girls I really wanted and railroad them through. One of them was the niece of Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda. It was a great disappointment to me to learn that she had never read his books. “Oh, they wouldn’t let me,” she said. “They have disgraced the family.”

It lasted for the first week and a half of classes and the first three meetings in the crowded attic room where the votes were taken on burning issues such as whether or not to accept an invitation to enter the Sigma Chi Derby. “Rhoda can write us a skit,” the president said. “Rhoda, will you do it for us?”

“If you’ll find me a room in the house. I hate that dorm. I want to live here in the house.”

“As soon as one’s available. As soon as someone leaves. Someone usually flunks out after midterms. The minute there’s a room you can have it. We want you here.” All eyes were upon me. I was their whole new thing, their writer, a girl who was smart and also reasonably pretty.

“I’ll write it. But not this week. I really have to start going to my classes.”

It lasted through going to my classes. It lasted through the knowledge that I didn’t have a single teacher who inspired or interested me. Through the dirty chemistry lab with its antiquated equipment and the distracted young woman teaching American literature who didn’t even know poetry. It lasted until I got bored. All of a sudden the exhilaration dropped out of the adventure and I was walking around in the afternoons all over the campus of the University of Alabama trying to find someone to talk to. I thought about going to the newspaper office and asking for a job on the student newspaper but when I dropped by one afternoon it was closed. I took a copy of the paper home and read it and it bored me. Everything bored me. I was getting deeply tragically bored and there is nothing in the world as dangerous as a bored Celt.

It was on such a walk one Sunday afternoon that I met May Garth Sheffield at last. Charles William had told me about her. “Be sure and look up May Garth Sheffield from Birmingham,” he told me. “She’s the craziest girl I’ve ever known. She’s crazier than you are, Dee. She’s six feet tall. I went to Episcopal camp with her when I was little. Wait till you meet her. I’ll tell her that you’re coming. Don’t forget to look her up. I’ve got a feeling you will need her before it’s over. Remember I told you this.”