Now a boy, one of Monica’s most earnest students, is reading a prose poem, as he calls it, a “cubist collage” as he calls it, consisting of fragments of hallucinatory dialogue and description; and Monica tries to listen; and Monica tries very hard to care. The boy is someone of whom she has grown fond this past semester, one of the students who clearly admires her; perhaps, if it comes to it (will it?) such students will make a difference in her career at Glenkill. For Monica is not teaching quite so well as she once was, and Monica is not quite so . . . interested, it seems, in the school and its activities (“I was hurt, Monica, yes I was truly hurt, and I think I should tell you!—I was hurt,” Jill Starkie said a few days ago, cornering Monica in the library, “—you know you distinctly promised to drop by and James hurried back from Philadelphia just for the occasion—”). When she is present, however, as she is now (5:40 P.M. of this long long day) she gives every appearance of being intensely interested, doesn’t she; sympathetic; devoted.

Monica notes the curious phenomenon that when daffodils pass their prime their petals become paper-thin. The colorful centers remain (yellow, orangish-yellow) but the outer petals turn transparent.

Monica notes that the majority of boys in the Founders Room, scattered about on the sofas, the folding chairs, and the carpets, are dressed in the latest preppie fashion: school ties, of course; and white shirts; here and there a school blazer; but they are wearing shoes (loafers, jogging shoes) without socks—as they have been all winter, no matter the freezing temperatures.

(“Don’t your heels get raw, without socks?” Monica asked them, amused, genuinely curious. “Doesn’t your skin chafe, and bleed?” The boys allowed her to know that such considerations did not matter at all to them—that Miss Jensen simply did not, could not, understand. If shoes are to be worn without socks then shoes are to be worn without socks no matter the discomfort.)

Monica notes, waking from her trance, a sudden restlessness in the room; a flurry of whispers; muffled laughter. The boy solemnly intoning the cubist collage has made an error . . . a blunder of taste, or discretion . . . he has spiced his nearly indecipherable presentation with such disturbing words as vomit, entrails, semen, love . . . and it seems to be (can it be?) that his prose poem is a homosexual fantasy, a lyric celebrating “gayness.” . . . Monica, frightened, wants to lean over to him, to command him to stop: doesn’t he know how he is exposing himself, and in this intolerant company: doesn’t he know how the other boys, now listening closely, are smirking, staring, grinning in incredulous contempt. . . .