So my little nineteen-year-old mind would meander through its maze of hope and fear as I moved from one end of the campus to the other, walking hurriedly, usually in the early evening and always alone. With other people I was always cheerful and hopeful and optimistic and in a good mood. I had too much pride to allow anyone to know I was unhappy. Of course, I would throw Bob Rosen into a conversation to let them know I was human and had darknesses and secret sorrows. In the same way I would pretend to hate school to make stupid people feel at ease. I had never needed Nietzsche to tell me that the weak hate and fear the strong. I knew how to play that game. The wonderful thing about the past summer with Charles William was not the Dexedrine or the freedom but the fact that every morning I could walk down the street and find someone to talk to who wanted the best I had to give, the best my mind could offer. I had not found anyone in Tuscaloosa who sparked that in me. It certainly never occurred to me that I could find a boyfriend who was smart. My mother had programmed me to breed with her kind of man. He had to be six feet tall and a good dancer. Nothing else would do. I kept having a hard time finding anyone who fit the bill. The tall boys couldn’t dance and I wasn’t supposed to take the short ones seriously. None of them could think as fast as I could or read or write as well. The brilliant, intellectually curious boys were all off hiding somewhere, as miserable and unfinished as I was. The higher the intelligence the slower the rate of maturation, I would learn later. For now, I knew nothing and I was passing by the boys I could have talked to. Contemptuous of their needfulness, I wandered around being in love with mythical Bob Rosen and an occasional professor and drunken fraternity boys when they were drunk enough to be self-assured. I spit on the grave of my twenties, one of the Algonquin wits had written. It should have been engraved over the lintel of the Chi Omega house.

It was on such a walk, full of such morbid thoughts, that I finally encountered May Garth Sheffield.

As I came within sight of the Tri Delta house I saw an extremely tall girl standing on the steps that led down to an abandoned garden and wisteria arbor. She was standing alone, staring at the sky, so still I thought at first she was a statue. “Hi,” I called up. “I’ll bet you’re May Garth, aren’t you? I’m Rhoda Manning. Charles William Waters told me to look you up. Did he tell you about me?”