He had not been able to analyze the nature and all the reasons for his passion. Rowena Stanley could not be considered a beautiful girl. He had had other girls in his classes in the past, when the juices of youth had bubbled high inside him, girls who had really been beautiful, and he had felt no compelling attraction. As before a painting or a statue, he might have admired their beauty, but he had never gone beyond that. But Rowena was somehow, mysteriously, different.
He gave her another quick glance. She sat in the back tier of desks — her own choice lately — though there were plenty of empty closer seats. She had her legs crossed, her skirt carefully drawn over her knees. Her legs were good, feminine, but scarcely objects in themselves to send a man reeling. Her brown tweed suit was not new, not especially flattering. She did not dress to attract men, at least not in Professor Hollis’ class. Her head was bent diligently over her notes. She was blonde, naturally, he was sure. But it wasn’t just that. He’d had dozens of blondes in classes before. Rowena? The name? Scott’s heroine. But Howard Hollis, at age forty, was certainly beyond the stage of being infatuated by a romantic name.
The class dragged on, an exquisite torture. What a ridiculous situation to be in, to anticipate these thrice weekly sessions with-ecstatic expectations, like a lover impatiently awaiting a rendezvous, and then when the moment arrived, to be so frustrated and disappointed that the mere presence of his beloved was an agony and he desperately wanted her to be gone. He felt a sweat emerging on his brow, though the room had a wintry chill, and he clenched his fists in order to get a better grip on himself.
The Inferno. He lectured on automatically, detailing the dreadful punishments of Dante’s damned souls. How appropriate, he thought; he might have been describing his own anguish. He glanced frequently at his watch. The seconds were ticking by with the slowness of an eternity in hell. He wondered in a threatening panic if his strain were apparent. Possibly not. The heads remained bowed over the notebooks, including that blonde head whose errant tendrils formed a supernatural mist, a halo, over its owner. This madness could not go on!
It ended mercifully with the ringing of a faraway bell. His voice hummed mechanically to the end of his sentence, then finished abruptly with, “that’ll be all for today.” The students, except for Rowena, looked up at him in a kind of relief, and a chubby brown-haired girl gave him a vacant, perfunctory smile. No one stayed after time with a question. No one was that interested. They seldom were. They packed up books, donned coats that had lain over vacant chairs, and filed out, pretending not to be in a hurry, though they really were. Rowena went with the others, in the very middle of the group. Professor Hollis heard their chatter in the hallway. They weren’t talking about Dante. Five o’clock Friday afternoon, they were discussing week-end dates and activities. Possibly one of the young men was making a date with Rowena. She was not outstandingly popular as she was not outstandingly pretty, but on a predominantly male campus she received her share of attention.
Friday. He wouldn’t see her again till Monday. Seventy-two hours. The relief of not having to be in the same room with her for another seventy-two hours. And the simultaneous pain of seventy-two hours of separation from one whose company he ardently wished to share.
Acting on impulse and not quite knowing his own intention, Howard Hollis struggled hastily into his topcoat, grabbed his briefcase and hat, and stalked out of the room. The hallway was empty. All that was left of his students was the dying echo of their retreating footsteps and their fading laughter. But he knew which way Rowena usually went and that was the direction he took now.
In the shadowy entrance of the old building he came to a sudden halt. Rowena was there at the bottom of the stone steps, chatting with not one, but two, young men. Stabbed by jealousy, Howard Hollis didn’t know whether to change his mind and dash out the back way, or to linger here, hoping.
But while he still debated between beating a cautious, wise retreat and plunging ahead into foolishness, Rowena’s two young friends made off to the left toward the men’s dorms and she herself headed straight across the campus. The temptation was now quite irresistible, and Howard succumbed to it.
By the time he was outside and down the steps, Rowena was fifty feet ahead of him. He did not want to yell for her to wait for him, and it would have been just as unseemly for a professor to be seen running in pursuit of a student. He forced himself to be content with a brisk stride, although, since he was a short man, this gait did not devour distances too rapidly.
The girl was walking fast also. The winter wind, coming at her from her right side, ruffled her blonde hair and molded her skirt and coat around her body. In her low-heeled shoes, her legs seemed more sturdy than willowy. Lithe, graceful, even athletic, she was certainly not the wispy, large-eyed, horn-rimmed-glasses, intellectual type that Professor Hollis might have been expected to gravitate toward. But logic and reason did not impel him now.
Abruptly she turned off to the right. If she had bothered to look she might have noticed him, but she did not look. She took the path between the Engineering and the Physics building, but Howard did not dare accost her there. But then she left the sidewalks and headed toward the well known short-cut through the little patch of woods. High Street lay beyond, but almost a block distant. Many students who did not want to go all the way around to Fulton Avenue took the short-cut. Perhaps she wanted to do some quick shopping before returning to her boarding house for dinner.
Dinner! He could catch up with her and invite her to dinner. That should certainly be within the bounds of propriety. She ought to crave a change from her boarding house fare, and not many of the students could afford to take a coed to dinner.
In the early winter dusk she was lost from view the instant she entered the woods. But the path was well marked, and now that he was hidden from onlookers, Howard broke into a trot. This wasn’t much of a woods really, and not very wild, merely a little tract that the college was saving for future development.
He almost stumbled into her in the dimness before he called out, “Rowena... Miss Stanley...”
The quick way she swung around and the pallor of her face told him that he’d startled her, and he hastened to apologize. “I’m sorry if I frightened you...”
“I’m not frightened.” Her voice, ordinarily such a pleasant, throaty voice, had a quaver in it, and the words seemed more intended to reassure herself than him.
“I saw you take the short-cut. Or at least I thought it was you.” The lie was transparent, and he was ashamed of his inability to make this encounter appear accidental. She was staring wide-eyed at him, obviously certain that he had followed her all the way from the classroom, and just as obviously apprehensive over that fact.
There was a long silence, with neither of them knowing what to say next. They stood in the midst of a larger silence. High Street would be full of cars and people, but their noise did not penetrate this far. Behind them, though closer, the campus was in a lull, the day classes having ended, and the few Friday evening classes not yet begun. The wood itself, devoid of wild life at this time of year, did not even yield the chirping of a bird.
This sudden solitude, this solitude in Rowena’s company, sent Howard’s pulse pounding, confused his mind, made him forget the easy talk that was so hard for him to make in the best of circumstances, made him forget even that clever dinner invitation.