Читать книгу Gaudy Night - Dorothy L. Sayers - Страница 5

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'Tis proper to all melancholy men, saith Mercurialis, what conceit they have once entertained to be most intent, violent and continually about it. Invitis occurrit, do what they may, they cannot be rid of it, against their wills they must think of it a thousand times over, perpetuo molestantur, nee oblivisci possunt, they are continually troubled with it, in company, out of company; at meat, at exercise, at all times and places, non desinunt ea, quae minime volunt, cogitare; if it be offensive especially, they cannot forget it.

Robert Burton

So far, so good, thought Harriet, changing for dinner. There had been baddish moments, like trying to renew contact with Mary Stokes. There had also been a brief encounter with Miss Hillyard, the History tutor, who had never liked her, and who had said, with wry mouth and acidulated tongue, 'Well, Miss Vane, you have had some very varied experiences since we saw you last.' But there had been good moments too, carrying with them the promise of permanence in a Heracleitean universe. She felt it might be possible to survive the Gaudy Dinner, though Mary Stokes had dutifully bagged for her a place next herself, which was trying. Fortunately, she had contrived to get Phœbe Tucker on her other side. (In these surroundings, she thought of them still as Stokes and Tucker.)

The first thing to strike her, when the procession had slowly filed up to the High Table, and grace had been said, was the appalling noise in Hall. 'Strike' was the right word. It fell upon one like the rush and weight of a shouting waterfall; it beat on the ear like the hammer-clang of some infernal smithy; it savaged the air like the metallic clatter of fifty thousand monotype machines casting type. Two hundred female tongues, released as though by a spring, burst into high, clamorous speech. She had forgotten what it was like, but it came back to her to-night how, at the beginning of every term, she had felt that if the noise were to go on like that for one minute more, she would go quite mad. Within a week, the effect of it had always worn off. Use had made her immune. But now it shattered her unaccustomed nerves with all and more than all its original violence. People screamed in her ear, and she found herself screaming back. She looked rather anxiously at Mary; could any invalid bear it? Mary seemed not to notice; she was more animated than she had been earlier in the day and was screaming quite cheerfully at Dorothy Collins. Harriet turned to Phœbe.

'Gosh! I'd forgotten what this row was like. If I scream I shall be as hoarse as a crow. I'm going to bellow at you in a fog-horn kind of voice. Do you mind?'

'Not a bit. I can hear you quite well. Why on earth did God give women such shrill voices? Though I don't mind frightfully. It reminds me of native workmen quarrelling. They're doing us rather well, don't you think? Much better soup than we ever got.'

'They've made a special effort for Gaudy. Besides, the new Bursar's rather good, I believe; she was something to do with Domestic Economy. Dear old Straddles had a mind above food.'

'Yes; but I liked Straddles. She was awfully decent to me when I got ill just before Schools. Do you remember?'

'What happened to Straddles when she left?'

'Oh, she's Treasurer at Brontë College. Finance was really her line, you know. She had a real genius for figures.'

'And what became of that woman--what's her name? Peabody? Freebody?--you know--the one who always said solemnly that her great ambition in life was to become Bursar of Shrewsbury?'

'Oh, my dear! She went absolutely potty on some new kind of religion and joined an extraordinary sect somewhere or other where they go about in loin-cloths and have agapemones of nuts and grape-fruit. That is, if you mean Brodribb?'

'Brodribb--I knew it was something like Peabody. Fancy her of all people! So intensely practical and subfusc.'

'Reaction. I expect. Repressed emotional instincts and all that. She was frightfully sentimental inside, you know.'

'I know. She wormed round rather. Had a sort of a G.P. for Miss Shaw. Perhaps we were all rather inhibited in those days.'

'Well, the present generation doesn't suffer from that, I'm told. No inhibitions of any kind.'

'Oh, come, Phœbe. We had a good bit of liberty. Not like before Women's Degrees. We weren't monastic.'

'No, but we were born long enough before the War to feel a few restrictions. We inherited some sense of responsibility. And Brodribb came from a fearfully rigid sort of household--Positivists, or Unitarians or Presbyterians or something. The present lot are the real wartime generation, you know.'

'So they are. Well, I don't know that I've any right to throw stones at Brodribb.'

'Oh, my dear! That's entirely different. One thing's natural; the others--I don't know, but it seems to me like complete degeneration of the grey matter. She even wrote a book.'

'About agapemones?'

'Yes. And the Higher Wisdom. And Beautiful Thought. That sort of thing. Full of bad syntax.'

'Oh, lord! Yes--that's pretty awful, isn't it? I can't think why fancy religions should have such a ghastly effect on one's grammar.'

'It's a kind of intellectual rot that sets in, I'm afraid. But which of them causes the other, or whether they're both symptoms of something else, I don't know. What with Trimmer's mental healing, and Henderson going nudist--'

'No!'

'Fact. There she is, at the next table. That's why she's so brown.'

'And her frock so badly cut. If you can't be naked, be as ill-dressed as possible, I suppose.'

'I sometimes wonder whether a little normal, hearty wickedness wouldn't be good for a great many of us.'

At this moment, Miss Mollison, from three places away on the same side of the table, leaned across her neighbours and screamed something.

'What?' screamed Phœbe.

Miss Mollison leaned still farther, compressing Dorothy Collins, Betty Armstrong and Mary Stokes almost to suffocation.

'I hope Miss Vane isn't telling you anything too blood-curdling!'

'No,' said Harriet loudly. 'Mrs. Bancroft is curdling my blood.'

'How?'

'Telling me the life-histories of our year.'

'Oh!' screamed Miss Mollison, disconcerted. The service of a dish of lamb and green peas intervened and broke up the formation, and her neighbours breathed again. But to Harriet's intense horror, the question and reply seemed to have opened up an avenue for a dark, determined woman with large spectacles and rigidly groomed hair, who sat opposite to her, and who now bent over and said, in piercingly American accents:

'I don't suppose you remember me, Miss Vane? I was only in college for one term, but I would know you anywhere. I'm always recommending your books to my friends in America who are keen to study the British detective story, because I think they are just terribly good.'

'Very kind of you,' said Harriet, feebly.

'And we have a very dear mutooal acquaintance,' went on the spectacled lady.

Heavens! thought Harriet. What social nuisance is going to be dragged out of obscurity now? And who is this frightful female?

'Really?' she said, aloud, trying to gain time while she ransacked her memory. 'Who's that Miss--'

'Schuster-Slatt,' prompted Phœbe's voice in her ear.

'Schuster-Slatt.' (Of course. Arrived in Harriet's first summer term. Supposed to read Law. Left after one term because the conditions at Shrewsbury were too restrictive of liberty. Joined the Home Students, and passed mercifully out of one's life.)

'How clever of you to know my name. Yes, well, you'll be surprised when I tell you, but in my work I see so many of your British aristocracy.'

Hell! thought Harriet. Miss Schuster-Slatt's strident tones dominated even the surrounding uproar.

'Your marvellous Lord Peter. He was so kind to me, and terribly interested when I told him I was at college with you. I think he's just a lovely man.'

'He has very nice manners,' said Harriet. But the implication was too subtle. Miss Schuster-Slatt proceeded:

'He was just wonderful to me when I told him all about my work.' (I wonder what it is, thought Harriet.) 'And of course I wanted to hear all about his thrilling detective cases, but he was much too modest to say anything. Do tell me, Miss Vane, does he wear that cute little eyeglass because of his sight, or is it part of an old English tradition?'

'I have never had the impertinence to ask him,' said Harriet.

'Now isn't that just like your British reticence!' exclaimed Miss Schuster-Slatt; when Mary Stokes struck in with:

'Oh, Harriet, do tell us about Lord Peter! He must be perfectly charming, if he's at all like his photographs. Of course you know him very well, don't you?'

'I worked with him over one case.'

'It must have been frightfully exciting. Do tell us what he's like.'

'Seeing,' said Harriet, in angry and desperate tones, 'seeing that he got me out of prison and probably saved me from being hanged, I am naturally bound to find him delightful.'

'Oh!' said Mary Stokes, flushing scarlet, and shrinking from Harriet's furious eyes as if she had received a blow. 'I'm sorry--I didn't think--'

'Well, there,' said Miss Schuster-Slatt, 'I'm afraid I've been very, very tactless. My mother always said to me, "Sadie, you're the most tactless girl I ever had the bad luck to meet." But I am enthusiastic. I get carried away. I don't stop to think. I'm just the same with my work. I don't consider my own feelings; I don't consider other people's feelings. I just wade right in and ask for what I want, and I mostly get it.'

After which, Miss Schuster-Slatt, with more sensitive feeling than one might have credited her with, carried the conversation triumphantly away to the subject of her own work, which turned out to have something to do with the sterilisation of the unfit, and the encouragement of matrimony among the intelligentsia.

Harriet, meanwhile, sat miserably wondering what devil possessed her to display every disagreeable trait in her character at the mere mention of Wimsey's name. He had done her no harm; he had only saved her from a shameful death and offered her an unswerving personal devotion; and for neither benefit had he ever claimed or expected her gratitude. It was not pretty that her only return should be a snarl of resentment. The fact is, thought Harriet, I have got a bad inferiority complex; unfortunately, the fact that I know it doesn't help me to get rid of it. I could have liked him so much if I could have met him on an equal footing....

The Warden rapped upon the table. A welcome silence fell upon the Hall. A speaker was rising to propose the toast of the University.

She spoke gravely, unrolling the great scroll of history, pleading for the Humanities, proclaiming the Pax Academica to a world terrified with unrest. 'Oxford has been called the home of lost causes: if the love of learning for its own sake is a lost cause everywhere else in the world, let us see to it that here, at least, it finds its abiding home.' Magnificent thought Harriet, but it is not war. And then, her imagination weaving in and out of the spoken words, she saw it as a Holy War, and that whole wildly heterogeneous, that even slightly absurd collection of chattering women fused into a corporate unity with one another and with every man and woman to whom integrity of mind meant more than material gain--defenders in the central keep of Man-soul, their personal differences forgotten in face of a common foe. To be true to one's calling, whatever follies one might commit in one's emotional life, that was the way to spiritual peace. How could one feel fettered, being the freeman of so great a city, or humiliated, where all enjoyed equal citizenship? The eminent professor who rose to reply spoke of a diversity of gifts but the same spirit. The note, once struck, vibrated on the lips of every speaker and the ear of every hearer. Nor was the Warden's review of the Academic year out of key with it: appointments, degrees, fellowships--all these were the domestic details of the discipline without which the community could not function. In the glamour of one Gaudy night, one could realise that one was a citizen of no mean city. It might be an old and an old-fashioned city, with inconvenient buildings and narrow streets where the passers-by squabbled foolishly about the right of way; but her foundations were set upon the holy hills and her spires touched heaven.

Leaving the Hall in this rather exalted mood, Harriet found herself invited to take coffee with the Dean.

She accepted, after ascertaining that Mary Stokes was bound for bed by doctor's orders and had therefore no claim upon her company. She therefore made her way along to the New Quad and tapped upon Miss Martin's door. Gathered together in the sitting-room she found Betty Armstrong, Phœbe Tucker, Miss de Vine, Miss Stevens the Bursar, another of the Fellows who answered to the name of Barton, and a couple of old students a few years senior to herself. The Dean, who was dispensing coffee, hailed her arrival cheerfully.

'Come along! Here's coffee that is coffee. Can nothing be done about the Hall coffee, Steve?'

'Yes, if you'll start a coffee-fund,' replied the Bursar. 'I don't know if you've ever worked out the finance of really first-class coffee for two hundred people.'

'I know,' said the Dean. 'It's so trying to be grovellingly poor. I think I'd better mention it to Flackett. You remember Flackett, the rich one, who was always rather odd. She was in your year, Miss Fortescue. She has been following me round, trying to present the College with a tankful of tropical fish. Said she thought it would brighten the Science Lecture-Room.'

'If it would brighten some of the lectures,' said Miss Fortescue, 'it might be a good thing. Miss Hillyard's Constitutional Developments were a bit gruesome in our day.'

'Oh, my dear! Those Constitutional Developments! Dear me, yes--they still go on. She starts every year with about thirty students and ends up with two or three earnest black men, who take every word down solemnly in note-books. Exactly the same lectures; I don't think even fish would help them. Anyway, I said, "It's very good of you, Miss Flackett, but I really don't think they'd thrive. It would mean putting in a special heating system, wouldn't it? And it would make extra work for the gardeners." She looked so disappointed, poor thing; so I said she'd better consult the Bursar.'

'All right,' said Miss Stevens, 'I'll tackle Flackett, and suggest the endowment of a coffee-fund.'

'Much more useful than tropical fish,' agreed the Dean. 'I'm afraid we do turn out some oddities. And yet, you know, I believe Flackett is extremely sound upon the life-history of the liver-fluke. Would anybody like a Benedictine with the coffee? Come along, Miss Vane. Alcohol loosens the tongue, and we want to hear all about your latest mysteries.'

Harriet obliged with a brief résumé of the plot she was working on.

'Forgive me, Miss Vane, for speaking frankly,' said Miss Barton, leaning earnestly forward, 'but after your own terrible experience, I wonder that you care about writing that kind of book.'

The Dean looked a little shocked.

'Well,' said Harriet, 'for one thing, writers can't pick and choose until they've made money. If you've made your name for one kind of book and then switch over to another, your sales are apt to go down, and that's the brutal fact.' She paused. 'I know what you're thinking--that anybody with proper sensitive feeling would rather scrub floors for a living. But I should scrub floors very badly, and I write detective stories rather well. I don't see why proper feeling should prevent me from doing my proper job.'

'Quite right,' said Miss de Vine.

'But surely,' persisted Miss Barton, 'you must feel that terrible crimes and the sufferings of innocent suspects ought to be taken seriously, and not just made into an intellectual game.'

'I do take them seriously in real life. Everybody must. But should you say that anybody who had tragic experience of sex, for example, should never write an artificial drawing-room comedy?'

'But isn't that different?' said Miss Barton, frowning. 'There is a lighter side to love; whereas there's no lighter side to murder.'

'Perhaps not, in the sense of a comic side. But there is a purely intellectual side to the detection.'

'You did investigate a case in real life, didn't you? How did you feel about that?'

'It was very interesting.'

'And, in the light of what you knew, did you like the idea of sending a man to the dock and the gallows?'

'I don't think it's quite fair to ask Miss Vane that,' said the Dean. 'Miss Barton,' she added, a little apologetically, to Harriet, 'is interested in the sociological aspects of crime, and very eager for the reform of the penal code.'

'I am,' said Miss Barton. 'Our attitude to the whole thing seems to me completely savage and brutal. I have met so many murderers when visiting prisons; and most of them are very harmless, stupid people, poor creatures, when they aren't definitely pathological.'

'You might feel differently about it,' said Harriet, 'if you'd happened to meet the victims. They are often still stupider and more harmless than the murderers. But they don't make a public appearance. Even the jury needn't see the body unless they like. But I saw the body in that Wilvercombe case--I found it; and it was beastlier than anything you can imagine.'

'I'm quite sure you must be right about that,' said the Dean. 'The description in the papers was more than enough for me.'

'And,' went on Harriet to Miss Barton, 'you don't see the murderers actively engaged in murdering. You see them when they're caught and caged and looking pathetic. But the Wilvercombe man was a cunning, avaricious brute, and quite ready to go on and do it again, if he hadn't been stopped.'

'That's an unanswerable argument for stopping them,' said Phœbe, 'whatever the law does with them afterwards.'

'All the same,' said Miss Stevens, 'isn't it a little cold-blooded to catch murderers as an intellectual exercise? It's all right for the police--it's their duty.'

'In law,' said Harriet, 'it is every citizen's obligation--though most people don't know that.'

'And this man Wimsey,' said Miss Barton, 'who seems to make a hobby of it--does he look upon it as a duty or as an intellectual exercise?'

'I'm not sure,' said Harriet, 'but, you know, it was just as well for me that he did make a hobby of it. The police were wrong in my case--I don't blame them, but they were--so I'm glad it wasn't left to them.'

'I call that a perfectly noble speech,' said the Dean. 'If anyone had accused me of doing something I hadn't done, I should be foaming at the mouth.'

'But it's my job to weigh evidence,' said Harriet, 'and I can't help seeing the strength of the police case. It's a matter of a + b, you know. Only there happened to be an unknown factor.'

'Like that thing that keeps cropping up in the new kind of physics,' said the Dean. 'Planck's constant, or whatever they call it.'

'Surely,' said Miss de Vine, 'whatever comes of it, and whatever anybody feels about it, the important thing is to get at the facts.'

'Yes,' said Harriet; 'that's the point. I mean, the fact is that I didn't do the murder, so that my feelings are quite irrelevant. If I had done it, I should probably have thought myself thoroughly justified, and been deeply indignant about the way I was treated. As it is, I still think that to inflict the agonies of poisoning on anybody is unpardonable. The particular trouble I got let in for was as much sheer accident as falling off a roof.'

'I really ought to apologise for having brought the subject up at all,' said Miss Barton. 'It's very good of you to discuss it so frankly.'

'I don't mind--now. It would have been different just after it happened. But that awful business down at Wilvercombe shed rather a new light on the matter--showed it up from the other side.'

'Tell me,' said the Dean, 'Lord Peter--what is he like?'

'To look at, do you mean? or to work with?'

'Well, one knows more or less what he looks like. Fair and Mayfair. I meant, to talk to.'

'Rather amusing. He does a good deal of the talking himself, if it comes to that.'

'A little merry and bright, when you're feeling off-colour?'

'I met him once at a dog-show,' put in Miss Armstrong unexpectedly. 'He was giving a perfect imitation of the silly-ass-about-town.'

'Then he was either frightfully bored or detecting something,' said Harriet, laughing. 'I know that frivolous mood, and it's mostly camouflage--but one doesn't always know for what.'

'There must be something behind it,' said Miss Barton, 'because he's obviously very intelligent. But is it only intelligence, or is there any genuine feeling?'

'I shouldn't,' said Harriet, gazing thoughtfully into her empty coffee-cup, 'accuse him of any lack of feeling. I've seen him very much upset, for instance, over convicting a sympathetic criminal. But he is really rather reserved, in spite of that deceptive manner.'

'Perhaps he's shy,' suggested Phœbe Tucker, kindly. 'People who talk a lot often are. I think they are very much to be pitied.'

'Shy?' said Harriet. 'Well, hardly. Nervy, perhaps--that blessed word covers a lot. But he doesn't exactly seem to call for pity.'

'Why should he?' said Miss Barton. 'In a very pitiful world, I don't see much need to pity a young man who has everything he can possibly want.'

'He must be a remarkable person if he has that,' said Miss de Vine, with a gravity that her eyes belied.

'And he's not so young as all that,' said Harriet. 'He's forty-five.' (This was Miss Barton's age.)

'I think it's rather an impertinence to pity people,' said the Dean.

'Hear, hear!' said Harriet. 'Nobody likes being pitied. Most of us enjoy self-pity, but that's another thing.'

'Caustic,' said Miss de Vine, 'but painfully true.'

'But what I should like to know,' pursued Miss Barton, refusing to be diverted, 'is whether this dilettante gentleman does anything, outside his hobbies of detecting crimes and collecting books, and, I believe, playing cricket in his off-time.'

Harriet, who had been congratulating herself upon the way in which she was keeping her temper, was seized with irritation.

'I don't know,' she said. 'Does it matter? Why should he do anything else? Catching murderers isn't a soft job, or a sheltered job. It takes a lot of time and energy, and you may very easily get injured or killed. I dare say he does it for fun, but at any rate, he does do it. Scores of people must have as much reason to thank him as I have. You can't call that nothing.'

'I absolutely agree,' said the Dean. 'I think one ought to be very grateful to people who do dirty jobs for nothing, whatever their reason is.'

Miss Fortescue applauded this. 'The drains in my week-end cottage got stopped up last Sunday, and a most helpful neighbour came and unstopped them. He got quite filthy in the process and I apologised profusely, but he said I owed him no thanks, because he was inquisitive and liked drains. He may not have been telling the truth, but even if he was, I certainly had nothing to grumble about.'

'Talking of drains,' said the Bursar--

The conversation took a less personal and more anecdotal turn (for there is no chance assembly of people who cannot make lively conversation about drains), and after a little time, Miss Barton retired to bed. The Dean breathed a sigh of relief.

'I hope you didn't mind too much,' she said. 'Miss Barton is the most terribly downright person, and she was determined to get all that off her chest. She is a splendid person, but hasn't very much sense of humour. She can't bear anything to be done except from the very loftiest motives.'

Harriet apologised for having spoken so vehemently.

'I thought you took it all wonderfully well. And your Lord Peter sounds a most interesting person. But I don't see why you should be forced to discuss him, poor man.'

'If you ask me,' observed the Bursar, 'we discuss everything a great deal too much in this university. We argue about this and that and why and wherefore, instead of getting the thing done.'

'But oughtn't we to ask what things we want done,' objected the Dean.

Harriet grinned at Betty Armstrong, hearing the familiar academic wrangle begin. Before ten minutes had passed, somebody had introduced the word 'values.' An hour later they were still at it. Finally the Bursar was heard to quote:

'God made the integers; all else is the work of man.'

'Oh, bother!' cried the Dean. 'Do let's keep mathematics out of it. And physics. I cannot cope with them.'

'Who mentioned Planck's constant a little time ago?'

'I did, and I'm sorry for it. I call it a revolting little object.'

The Dean's emphatic tones reduced everybody to laughter, and, midnight striking, the party broke up.

'I am still living out of College,' said Miss de Vine to Harriet. 'May I walk across to your room with you?'

Harriet assented, wondering what Miss de Vine had to say to her. They stepped out together into the New Quad. The moon was up, painting the buildings with cold washes of black and silver whose austerity rebuked the yellow gleam of lighted windows behind which old friends reunited still made merry with talk and laughter.

'It might almost be term-time,' said Harriet.

'Yes.' Miss de Vine smiled oddly. 'If you were to listen at those windows, you would find it was the middle-aged ones who were making the noise. The old have gone to bed, wondering whether they have worn as badly as their contemporaries. They have suffered some shocks, and their feet hurt them. And the younger ones are chattering soberly about life and its responsibilities. But the women of forty are pretending they are undergraduates again, and finding it rather an effort. Miss Vane--I admired you for speaking as you did to-night. Detachment is a rare virtue, and very few people find it lovable, either in themselves or in others. If you ever find a person who likes you in spite of it--still more, because of it--that liking has very great value, because it is perfectly sincere, and because, with that person, you will never need to be anything but sincere yourself.'

'That is probably very true,' said Harriet, 'but what makes you say it?'

'Not any desire to offend you, believe me. But I imagine you come across a number of people who are disconcerted by the difference between what you do feel and what they fancy you ought to feel. It is fatal to pay the smallest attention to them.'

'Yes,' said Harriet, 'but I am one of them. I disconcert myself very much. I never know what I do feel.'

'I don't think that matters, provided one doesn't try to persuade one's self into appropriate feelings.'

They had entered the Old Quad, and the ancient beeches, most venerable of all Shrewsbury institutions, cast over them a dappled and changing shadow-pattern that was more confusing than darkness.

'But one has to make some sort of choice,' said Harriet. 'And between one desire and another, how is one to know which things are really of overmastering importance?'

'We can only know that,' said Miss de Vine, 'when they have overmastered us.'

The chequered shadow dropped off them, like the dropping of linked silver chains. Each after each, from all the towers of Oxford, clocks struck the quarter-chime, in a fumbling cascade of friendly disagreement. Miss de Vine bade Harriet good night at the door of Burleigh Building and vanished, with her long, stooping stride beneath the Hall archway.

An odd woman, thought Harriet, and of a penetrating shrewdness. All Harriet's own tragedy had sprung from 'persuading herself into appropriate feelings' towards a man whose own feelings had not stood up to the test of sincerity either. And, all her subsequent instability of purpose had sprung from the determination that never again would she mistake the will to feel for the feeling itself. 'We can only know what things are of overmastering importance when they have overmastered us.' Was there anything at all that had stood firm in the midst of her indecisions? Well, yes; she had stuck to her work--and that in the face of what might have seemed overwhelming reasons for abandoning it and doing something different. Indeed, though she had shown cause that evening for this particular loyalty, she had never felt it necessary to show cause to herself. She had written what she felt herself called upon to write; and, though she was beginning to feel that she might perhaps do this thing better, she had no doubt that the thing itself was the right thing for her. It had overmastered her without her knowledge or notice, and that was the proof of its mastery.

She paced for some minutes to and fro in the quad, too restless to go in and sleep. As she did so, her eye was caught by a sheet of paper, fluttering untidily across the trim turf. Mechanically she picked it up and, seeing that it was not blank, carried it into Burleigh Building with her for examination. It was a sheet of common scribbling paper, and all it bore was a childish drawing scrawled heavily in pencil. It was not in any way an agreeable drawing--not at all the kind of thing that one would expect to find in a college quadrangle. It was ugly and sadistic. It depicted a naked figure of exaggeratedly feminine outlines, inflicting savage and humiliating outrage upon some person of indeterminate gender clad in a cap and gown. It was neither sane nor healthy; it was, in fact, a nasty, dirty and lunatic scribble.

Harriet stared at it for a little time in disgust, while a number of questions formed themselves in her mind. Then she took it upstairs with her into the nearest lavatory, dropped it in and pulled the plug on it. That was the proper fate for such things, and there was an end of it; but for all that, she wished she had not seen it.