The picture of the rooming house in the brochure had looked so romantic and different, but it was simply small, cramped, and cold. The gleaming walls, shining tile floor, and acres of glass which meant classrooms in her mind had been replaced by old, rickety warrens which seemed to have corridors and stairways going of in directions which formed no pattern. And the looks on the professors faces when she finally found her classrooms and tried to creep quietly to a seat would melt a stone statue. And the food was sparse, tasted strange, and it made her feel faintly ill. They laughed at her if she ordered milk but if she drank the wine she couldn't even eat without getting half clouted. She longed for a milk shake, a hot dog, and a bag of popcorn. She was catching a head cold. She was so heartbreakingly, unspeakable lonely. She buried her face in the pillow and cried.
There was a soft knock on the door. She raised her head, scrubbing the tears from her cheeks with her hands, and looked at the door. The knock came again, and she slid off the bed and walked to the door, opening it a crack. It was a woman standing in the darkness of the hallway. She opened the door wider, and the woman stepped forward with a smile. Janice's mouth fell open as she stumbled back a step. The woman's beauty hit her with the stunning force of a physical blow. Dark, thick masses of gleaming hair falling in thick tresses around a lovely, triangular face. Massive dark eyes with the barest suggestion of a dramatic upward taper at the corners, contrasting sharply with her smooth, stark white skin. Lustrous, evenly spaced teeth, and full, smiling lips. She was three or four inches taller than Janice, and dressed in a chic, expensive-looking dress and high heels. A striking figure, slender but fully developed, with large breasts and a small waist swelling out to gracefully curved hips and thighs. There had been times before when she'd felt a stirring quiver at feminine beauty, tugging strongly at her, and she had quickly smothered it and pushed it to the back of her mind. But that had been nothing compared to this. She felt a swelling, something throttling her and taking her breath away, and the fiery tingles racing out to her limbs made her feel giddy and faint.
The woman was standing just inside the room and smiling, and Janice caught the word "Uhr" in the rapid flow of German as the woman laughingly explained something in a self-deprecating tone; apparently her watch had stopped. Janice glanced at her watch, translating in her mind. "Es ist sieben uhr junjimdvierzig."
The woman's smile became thoughtful as she looked at Janice more closely, absently murmuring, "danke," then she smiled wider again. "Bist du eine Schulerin?"
She was asking Janice if she was a student, and Janice nodded. "Ja. Ich bin ein Schulerin."
The woman nodded, murmuring "eine Schulerin" and correcting her grammar absently as her eyes moved over Janice's face, then she lifted one white, smooth hand and touched the trace of moisture on Janice's cheek. Her smile became soft and solicitous as she asked another question. Janice couldn't understand the words, but the beautiful woman's expression was more eloquent than any words; she was asking why Janice had been crying. Tears of choking self-pity swelled up in her eyes, and she looked away as she shook her head rapidly in a negative. The woman moved closer, putting one hand on her shoulder and the other one on the side of her face, turning it up as her tone became more insistent. Everything seemed to swell up at once. The appalling loneliness, the inability to understand anyone, the frustrations, the disappointments, and the heartbreak. It combined with the lovely woman's nearness, the strange quiverings she felt stirring within her, and the offered sympathy. She burst into tears, throwing her arms around the woman's neck and burying her face against the soft, downy fragrance of her white throat.
The woman reached back and pushed the door closed, then she led Janice toward the bed with her arms around her and one soft hand patting her face, murmuring in a soothing whisper, and she sat down on the edge of the bed, pulling Janice down beside her. It all came out in deep, bitter sobs as the woman held her and calmed her. Then she became aware that her tears had stained the shoulder and neckline of the woman's dress, and she tried to apologize in a stammer of broken German. The woman waved it off, questioning her again on what was bothering her. Janice began to try to explain, searching her mind for words, and the woman nodded in comprehension as she wrinkled her smooth brow slightly in the effort to understand Janice's German. A couple of the concepts – loneliness and homesickness – were beyond her vocabulary, and she got up to get her phrase book from the top of the dresser. They weren't in it – nothing she really needed ever was – and when she turned back the woman had taken her books and study pamphlets from the nightstand and was spreading them out on the bed.
Janice was delighted to learn that the woman apparently had a broad grasp of music, but somehow her problems with school meant less to her than to intrude on the woman's time. She got that across, and the woman waved it impatiently aside as she leafed through the books to locate her daily lessons. One of the worst assignments was a long list of incomprehensible, unpronounceable technical terms which had seemed to bear more relation to anatomy than to music, but they became a velvety melody in the woman's mouth. She went over the list with what seemed to be indefatigable patience, correcting her pronunciation with an untiring smile, and Janice found herself exerting herself to the utmost, trembling with anxiety and sweat breaking out on her palms to win a smile of congratulation from the woman. Then – amazingly – the entire list was firmly entrenched in her memory along with the meanings and the woman was turning to the lessons on theory. The words she'd memorized proved to be the key to what had been a total mystery before, and all the lessons for the past week fell into place as they went over them.
The history hadn't been as much of a problem as the others, but she reviewed it with Janice anyway, smiling and nodding when Janice rattled off the names, dates, and places, occasionally correcting her pronunciation. The prospect of going back to class the following day rapidly began to look much less ominous as they finished. The woman began looking through the rest of her papers and notes as she snapped out verbs and nouns for Janice to conjugate and decline, and she listened to her going through them, nodding or correcting her as she leafed through the papers. Her attention focused on a sheet, and Janice looked to see what it was. It was her class schedule. Janice's attention wandered and she began to try to decline a noun in the wrong class and the woman corrected her with a murmur, still looking at the paper.
Janice's mouth fell open in shock when she glanced at her watch; it was almost two o'clock in the morning. She began to apologize profusely and tried to thank the woman, but she shook her head and turned it aside as she stacked the books and pamphlets back on the nightstand. The woman patted Janice's shoulder as they started walking toward the door, then she laughed and stopped, looking down at Janice. "Ach. Amerikanerinlein, ich vergass. Wie heisst du?"