PARTISAN REVIEW
she could neither read nor play Canfield and she sat idle and
un–
happy in her bed-sitting room where the wind came down the chimney
like a failing voice and now and then caused the long-handled bed–
warmer to stir on its hook, chiming against the bricks.
She had selected the very person she wished to become her foster–
father, a man about sixty whom she saw on Tuesday and Thursday
and Saturday afternoons in the town library, an incongruously mod–
ern building dedicated to the memory of Samuel Sewell. Here Rose
read books on psychology in a western room where the sun came
amply through the windows; in this room, besides herself, there
always sat a thoughtful gentleman, wearing a lemon-yellow ascot
and a sober dark blue suit. The ascot alone would have set him
down as a person of prominence, for no one unimportant, she reasoned,
could afford to be so boldly eccentric. She did not know what he
read through the scholarly Oxford glasses which perfectly fitted on
his stately nose and were anchored to his lapel by a black ribbon
ending in a silver button. The books were big, she knew that much,
and their bindings were
.a
usual maroon. He did not take any notes
(as she did voluminously, having been so recently graduated) and
he read quite slowly. He did not move all afternoon save that at half
past three he went outside and stood on the steps to smoke a ciga–
rette; she could see him clearly through the window beside which
she sat reading of Pavlov's submissive dog. Either he stood still, lean–
ing against a half-pillar of the half-Ionic
fa~ade
with his eyes closed
and his lips moving a little, or he took a turn around the little triangu–
lar yard, holding his hatless white head at a dignified backward angle.
Occasionally he paused under a tree and there, ankle deep in fallen
leaves from the wine-glass elm, he was lost impressively in specula–
tion. She thought he might be a mathematician or a novelist. Often
when he returned, bringing with him a final remnant of the autumn
air, he looked over at Rose across the tables and gave her an amiable,
perfunctory nod as if he were her busy employer passing through
the office of his underlings. Once he said something to her but in so
low a voice and with so noncommittal an expression on his face that
she did not understand and only smiled.
Despite her heritage of headlong impulse and her practice of
setting forth before the signal was given, Rose made no move to
further her acquaintance with the man and, indeed, she took pains
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