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IT WAS December; too cold now for them to meet beside the cannon. Nor did either of them want to encounter the rebuking faces of praiseworthy young ladies at the Y.W. C. A., though at the Y.W. was the only spacious and comfortable lounge in the college—not the Social Hall, with its Morris chairs, mass photographs of former classes, spectacled and dolorous, and tables covered with missionary magazines, but rather the Y.W. cafeteria and the small flowery tin tables where, any afternoon, were to be seen such erotic tableaux as the lady professor of geology giving tea and cinnamon buns to the pastor of the First Universalist Church, and the head of the physical culture department, a bouncing young lady don who was rumored to have been seen smoking cigarettes at Mouquin’s, in New York, giggling in a corner, over Coca Cola and Nabisco Wafers, with a giddy clothing-merchant from the town of Point Royal.

Such comparatively aseptic café life Ann and Hargis would have enjoyed, but they could not stand chatter; they were absorbed in each other; and they met in the waiting-room of Ann’s dormitory, a below-stairs closet with a large rusty radiator and eight stiff armchairs.

“I can’t stand this hole!” snapped Hargis. “Let’s sneak off into the country, Saturday afternoon.”

“Against the rules, Glenn.” If she had overlooked his cowardice, if again they were intimates, mind sliding into mind with no more self-defensive quibbling, yet she no longer accepted him as a superior officer; she called him “Glenn”, and refused to salute him.

“Oh, hang the old rules!” he whimpered.

“Certainly. I just don’t want to be expelled. Too much bother.”

“You needn’t be—rather, we needn’t be. Look, lamb. Last Saturday I tramped up Mt. Abora, and I found an old woodman’s shack—log cabin—door gone. Be a splendid place to make a fire and have picnic lunch—wooden table left—wonderful view down the valley. I’ll get all the stuff for the lunch—girls’d be snooping around and asking questions if you did. Come on! Let’s get away from this cursed convent and be human beings. Damn it, I believe I’ll go into the advertising business. I’m sick of being a little tin teacher: can’t say what you think. I’ve got a friend, a classmate, who’s got one of the very most important advertising positions in Chicago! He wants me to join him! Oh, let’s get out. You needn’t be afraid of me in the wilds, Annie!”

“I’m not! Mt. Abora?”

“Yes. Tramp up the Letticeville road, and meet me by the old brick church, twelve o’clock, noon, next Saturday. Will you? Will you?”

Log shack, camp fire in open air, view down the valley from a mountain throne, escape from the stares of close-pressed girls—it was enticing, and she hesitated only seconds before she nodded. “All right. Twelve. G’night.”

Afraid of him! Heavens! And yet the tease, the playboy, he did have glistening eyes and meaty hands.

She had not seen him before in English tweeds, grass-colored, with plus fours. Anyway, they were practically English, for they came from Marshall Field’s, in Chicago, along with the crinkly orange tie of raw silk, very worldly and artistic. And he told her, thrilling, that his knapsack was a real German rucksack which (far horizons in a little canvas!) he had carried in the Schwarzwald.

He carried it lightly. He seemed sturdier than ever in the folds of tweed, and he stepped lightly and sang. For all his splendor and Europeanism, as they tramped he did not discourse highly, but took her into his own rank by snickering intimately—as though they were both Juniors or both faculty members—about such scandals as the lady president’s moral union suits, betrayed by the lumpiness beneath her thick cotton stockings; the fond, loose-jawed, yearning glances which Professor the Reverend Mr. Sogles cast upon the bouncing physical culture instructor, and him with a poor bed-ridden invalid wife, who was so patient; and the rumor that the wife of Professor Jaswitch (French and Spanish) wrote all his lectures and corrected all his papers for him.

“She’s an awfully smart woman. But they say she drinks cocktails!” said Ann. She was ashamed of herself for it, but she was enjoying this gossip—as, of course, she should have.

“Cocktails? And what, my brave young Ann, may be the matter with cocktails? I wish I had some with us, for our lunch.”

“Why—why—they destroy the brain-tissue! That’s scientifically proven! You can find it in every physiology!”

“I congratulate you on having read every physiology. In Russian and Spanish, also?”

“Oh, you know what I mean!”

“Certainly! But do you? Matter of fact, a cocktail might be good for you. Might elevate you above your bloodless earnestness about things that don’t matter; might make you almost human and jolly! Wouldn’t you like to live, for once—love, or war? Wouldn’t you?”

His insistence was like a finger poked into her ribs. She was uncomfortable.

But otherwise he was neither airily professorial nor shroudingly amorous.

It was a scene out of a Western motion picture, or a novel about the rude, survirile hill-billy who kidnaps the frail city maid and makes her like it. The cabin was of rough logs, clay-chinked, authentic. Inside, were a puncheon floor, empty bunks, a rusty box-stove, and an unplaned table in the center, so that sitting at it you looked through the doorway, over a stony pasture, quiet with four inches of snow, and down the valley where the spruces were massed in dark clusters. She had gone a hundred years back from the Point Royal campus, and seemed to herself in a frontier life vigorous as the cold, sweet mountain air.

And Hargis, did he not combine the virtues of the romantic pioneer and those of the Cultured Traveler?

“Come on now!” he bullied. “Here’s a good pile of kindling and small wood—gathered ’em when I was up here the other day, and if I must, I’ll admit I gathered ’em with the treacherous hope that Ann would share ’em with me! Come on, shake a leg! Be useful and start a fire—here’s matches—while I unpack.”

But it was the Cultured part of him that from his rucksack produced, along with the sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs and coffee pot, a slim brown bottle.

“Why, it’s wine!” she marveled.

“It certainly is! Rüdesheimer. Genuine!”

“I don’t think—I don’t remember ever seeing a bottle of wine before. Just in pictures.”

“Do you mean to tell me you’ve never tasted wine?”

“No, never. I’ve had a few glasses of beer, German picnics, back home, but I never cared much for it. But—wine!”

“Does it afflict that chronic moral sense of yours?”

“No. I’d love to taste some. Of course, it’s against the rules. But then,” agreeably, “so is being up here with you at all, Glenn.”

“Exactly, my dear!”

She was truthful; she had never tasted wine. Her alcoholic adventures, besides the beer, had been an annual teaspoonful of hot whisky for a cold. So was it with half the college girls, even with the more serious and unpopular brands of college men, in 1910. The pendulum was to swing with American feverishness—in fact, in America, generally, a pendulum is not a pendulum; it is a piston. By 1915, the excellent wines of California were triumphing; Americans were everywhere beginning to drink them; yet in 1920 the girls were again like Ann—they knew nothing of wine, though they had this slight difference, they knew all about gin, and about raw alcohol colored with burnt sugar, called “whisky.” But by 1930 Prohibition had, despite all, proven itself a blessing, for it had taught American women to drink wine with their men, as European women had always done; taught not merely gin-experimenting schoolgirls, but the worthiest matrons, the testiest women college professors, the most devout uplifters, such as Superintendent Ann Vickers, LL.D.

With the wine, fussily wrapped—he screamed at her womanishly, “Oh, do be careful of those!”—he had brought two thin glasses on stems.

After a sandwich she tasted her wine. It seemed a little flat to her, flavored like mild vinegar. She was disappointed. Was this the nectar, the liquefied jewels, that launched young women on luxurious sin? She longed for a strawberry malted milk.

“Another glass, Annie?”

“Thanks, no. I guess you have to get used to the taste, to appreciate it.”

“Oh, come on! When I’ve brought it all this way? Of course you have to get used to it. Well, never mind. All the more for me, my dear!”

She was grateful to him for not insisting. And now the cool wine had turned to a glow in her stomach. She poured herself half a glass, while Hargis had the unexpected good sense not to comment. She felt warm and happy; the white strong valley was enchanting in its stillness; and Hargis was talking softly of vine-covered booths beside the Rhine.

They sat on the bench by the table, facing the open door. Lunch done, without comment he gave her a cigarette. For perhaps the dozenth time, she tried smoking, and for the dozenth time did not like it, though she found it part of all this magic: frail wine, far hills, secret cabin, Rhenish vineyards in the sun and, after so much feminine flutter and cooing on the campus, a Man.

She was not startled; she was comfortably pleased when he put his arm round her and drew her cheek down to his shoulder. She snuggled there, warm against the tweed. But she was annoyed when he lifted her cheek to kiss her, when he touched her breast.

Not much experienced, she had yet known enough dances, enough sleigh rides, not to be utterly naïve. “Oh, Lord, do all men follow this same careful-careless technique? All the same? And expect you to be surprised and conquered? Just as all cats chase mice the same way, and each thinks it’s the first bright cat to discover a mouse? Now the idiot will drop his arm and paw at my thigh.”

He did.

She sat up, furious that in betraying himself as just another Model T out of the mass-production, he betrayed her also as nothing but a mechanism, to be adjusted like a carburetor, to be bought like a gallon of gas. She threw off his arm, as his hand smoothed her thigh. “Oh, stop it!”

“Why, Ann! Why, my Ann! Are you going to spoil it by——You go and spoil it all by thinking beastly thoughts, when we were so happy, together, away from the campus——”

“ ‘Beastly!’ ” She was more furious. “I don’t mind your trying to seduce me. (Only you can’t!) But you’re old enough to not do the injured small boy!”

“I wasn’t trying to seduce you!”

“Weren’t you?”

“You make me sick, all you nuns, with your books and your little committees and your innocent little songs! Emotionally ten years old! Green-sick! And you’ll keep yourselves from life till you’re safely decanted and marry insurance men and live in bungalows with plate-glass in the front doors! When you might live—have all the world—purple Greece and golden Italy and misty England——”

“I don’t see just what being seduced has to do with visiting purple Greece and misty England. New way of paying for Cook’s Tours, I should think!”

“Everything! It has everything to do with it! Women who aren’t afraid, who have rich, exciting emotional experiences, they don’t get stuck in suburbs; they see the world—no, not just see it, like a tourist, but know it, live in it where they choose, mistresses of their own fates. You jeer, you try to be funny, when I bring you the wisdom and grace of Europe, along, of course, with what the European hasn’t got, what the American man has, the loyalty and dependability and kindness and——You idiot!”

To her considerable astonishment, she was seized and kissed soundly, so that she choked. She stopped despising him, and stopped being rational and lofty, and her lips seemed alive. “Oh, please!” she begged.

“Don’t you want to be a real woman, not just an educated phonograph? Don’t you want to feel, to have your whole body burn, to know glory, and not just timidity in a pinafore?”

“I do but—I’m not ready——”

“Shocked like a Sunday school brat!”

“I’m not shocked at all! Good heavens, this is the modern age! It’s not 1890! I’ve studied biology. But one doesn’t do these things lightly. I’d have a lover, if I wanted him enough, that particular him!”

“You wouldn’t! You’re too afraid!” He kissed her again, coarsely, fiercely. She was blinded a moment, for a moment thrilled, as though she were a barren estuary through which the returning tide was gushing. Then she was cold and empty as he overdid it. He was too realistic to be real.

“Stop it, I said!” she demanded. He loosed her but he stared hopefully, the ambitious little boy, sure that he really was going to the circus, and he urged, “You have no passion!”

“Oh, yes I have! Since we seem to be rather frank, I’ll tell you that I did feel the beginnings of a thrill, just now, till you decided to try the rôle of cave-man. Wude and wuff! Oh, Dr. Hargis!”

“No passion. Printer’s ink for blood. You’re a biological monstrosity, you and all the girls here. Too superior, you think, to meet a man on his own honest grounds! Biological monstrosity, that’s what the so-called well-bred American woman is! Not one atom of healthy, splendid passion!”

“Could it possibly occur to you that I might have plenty of passion for some men but not for you? Possibly you aren’t the heroic and tempting male you think you are. Once, I wanted to fall for a shoemaker’s son who worked in a grocery. He was a male. But you—fingering at seductions, turning your history into little smart-aleck attitudes! I’d rather be seduced by the Anthony Hall janitor!”

He threw his coffee pot into the rucksack, swung the sack brusquely round his shoulders, and tramped off, down the wood-road, not turning back.

She wanted to call to him. She didn’t want to be seduced—not now at least—but he was her intensest friend—at his worst he was warmer and more solid than any girl——

She piped up a feeble “Glenn!” but too late. He was out of sight.

Then she was touched by the small boy who had been so proud of his little lunch, his European knapsack, his copper coffee pot, his wine that he could not afford.

“Maybe he was right. Maybe I just talked myself into virtue,” said the moral young woman who had defied the vile seducer.

Then all effort to find out what she really thought was lost in a gray loneliness as the valley below her turned gray and chill and lonely.