Pamela Dean Read Online Free PDF Page A

turning, making October barren to the sight and the name of Indian summer a mockery. All the elms were giving up already, showering wet yellow leaves on the black asphalt of the sidewalks. The wind picked them up and plastered them to the reflecting glass of the Music and Drama Center.
    They did not improve that building's appearance; it was not ugly, but it sat between the pseudo-Gothic brick splendors of Ericson and the pure limestone lines of the chapel like a shoe box among jewelry chests. The rain pooled in all the low spots of the clever brick walks and terraces surrounding it, showing clearly all the flaws in its execution. Much of the Music and Drama Center was underground, and it leaked, and was going to cost a great deal of money to repair. Janet's father called it a perfect example of Modern Maladroit.
    Janet resented it the more because it stood on what had once been a fine field of wildflowers, crossing which had taken far less time than going around so large a building. At least all the reflective glass of its entrances showed you the lovely middle of campus. Janet stared instead at her passing image, between the leaves: a figure too small and too sturdy, with a too-curly cloud of very pleasing red hair.
    It was perhaps a mistake, she thought now that she could see herself whole and from a distance, to wear mint-green pants and an emerald-green shirt with a dark green jacket. Christina had looked at her oddly, and Christina always looked not only tidy but appealing, so her opinion on dress was worth considering. Always granting, of course, that the opinion on any subject was worth considering of somebody who had made three earnest efforts to read A Wrinkle in Time and pronounced it "silly."
    Well, at least she had Molly. And Peg Powell turned out to be possessed of a complete set of the works of E. Nesbit, which had been foolishly left at home, but which Peg promised to bring back after the Christmas break. Janet's mind, wandering fuzzily back to her first meeting with Peg, presented her suddenly with a picture that halted her in the middle of a puddle. "Peg and Sharon haven't got bunk beds!" she said aloud.
    A gust of wind blew into her eyes, and she began to walk again, carefully not talking to herself. No, it really had happened. Peg had distinctly said that she and Sharon had bunk beds; Sharon, in fact, had said Peg had gone for a hockey stick. But Janet could see with perfect clarity the blurred geometric pattern, purple and blue and dark pink, of Peg's bedspread, on the single bed with the four bookshelves above it: Chase and Phillips; Liddell and Scott; Whitman; the little red volumes of The Iliad and
    The Odyssey, two per epic; and a minor collection of books on music history crammed sideways at the end of the shelf. She had really seen that. She remembered the alarming dip of the bed under her knees, so that the lower s helf was almost too high
    for her to read the titles on it. No bunk beds. Sharon's bed had been across the room covered with a white spread trimmed in eyelet lace and scattered with red pillows.
    Janet gave up. She must have misunderstood something; or Peg had. Right now there was a class schedule to fight for, supposing she could ever find the office of her advisor.
    Her advisor was one Melinda Wolfe, an instructor in the notorious Classics Department. This did not mean, of course, that one could find her in the building that housed that department. Classics and Music had been fighting it out for sole possession of Chester Hall since 1954; the only visible result of many bitter battles was the housing of the minor members of both departments in a huddle of temporary buildings put up behind Masters Hall during World War II.
    Janet accordingly went on past Chester Hall where it glowered, among its ancient larches and its young maples, at the chapel surrounded by treeless lawn. She turned right and ducked around Masters Hall—another pseudo-Gothic splendor that moreover boasted a number of