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shoulders, a swing of step, had all misled me into false recognitions.
    I dropped down on the bed. I had thought I was cured. Did coming back mean this again? Tomorrow—tomorrow I would be in Northanger Abbey—so far removed from anything which coud remind me of the past that I would dare to relax. Better a house with a smoldering family feud than a major in an inn.
    Though I went wearily to bed, I could not sleep. For when I closed my eyes, or even opened them again upon the impersonal darkness of the room, it was summer, not late fall. Summer hot and humid as only Maryland summers could be.
    Summer—no, not the whole summer, just six weeksin truth—yet those stretched and stretched into a whole season. Six weeks from the morning in the college cafeteria when Mark Rohmer had sat down beside me at the table shared by the project people. Mark Rohmer, who led all the secretaries to reach for their compacts, who had caused even staid Miss Hawes to observe in a wintery tone that it was an excellent thing for our combined labors that all Major Rohmer’s assistants were of the male sex.
    Not only was he handsome, but he had the added attraction of the exotic, his background forming an item of conversation. Since the consciousness of racial beginnings had become so important, a Blackfoot Indian, the first of his race to graduate from West Point, was doubly notable. To this he could add a dominant personality and a high degree of trained intelligence.
    One did not, in the very prejudice-conscious Sixties, cling to the old mental picture of feathered warbonnet and facial paint, no matter how much one had been conditioned by film and book in childhood. On the other hand, neither did one quite imagine a cultivated man of the world (I had been used at that time to only Aunt Otilda’s beliefs and turns of speech) to be an Indian.
    On that momentous morning of our meeting, I had frozen as I had always done on the very rare occasions I had met an attractive man. My Aunt Otilda had early conditioned me to accept the fact I was without any pretense to attractiveness, and unredeemably shy and gauche into the bargain. But for some reasons, Major Rohmer had not acted as if I were invisible. On the contrary, he had persisted with various conversationalopenings until I dared to thaw a little. He must have considered me a challenge of sorts. Perhaps the game he then proceeded to play was born of boredom at being in Ladensville when all his desires lay elsewhere. At the time I began to believe that we had many likes and dislikes in common.
    Acquaintance, on my part, grew to something else. Thinking about it even now, years later, could bring a burning flush to my face. Why spare myself? I had been a far too naive and silly fool! I should have anticipated the end.
    There had been the Saturday when we had both been free for the afternoon, and he had asked me to lunch at a country inn. I had been nearly shaking with excitement—and—any—no! We had gone across the road after eating to where there was a church bazaar in progress. He had won a horrible rayon bedspread at a raffle and had laughingly given it back to be reoffered. There had been such good times—when his very company had released me from the hard shell of self-doubt my childhood had encased about me. If I could only remember those and forget the rest!
    Six weeks of excitement, dreams, hopes—then his going. But letters—letters I fed fiercely to a fire five months later, as fast as I could. There had been a last letter to bring me to Washington.
    Now my hands balled into fists. Go on—remember this—relive it—don’t try to dress it up, excuse your own stupid hopes for the impossible. I was so humiliated to think of what I had believed might be possible that thereafter my only relief was that Aunt Otilda never knew. If she had, I would never have been ableto survive the constant carping into which she had lapsed during the last two years of her narrow and self-imprisoned