238
PARTISAN REVIEW
enough to be bored by his situation. Still, Lucy's enlightenment
thrived whenever Mrs. Plaut talked about Craven-which occasions
were perhaps more frequent than the subject demanded. This faculty
wife liked to talk; and so Lucy already knew that Craven was mar–
ried, that it was a mistake of
his
youth; that he was in despair, and
that he now willed himself into misery by preserving the form of a
relation that had ceased to please him. Professor Plaut's student could
not know, of course, that if Donald Craven failed to walk back
with her, he would spend all his energies in stalking Mrs. Plaut. Lucy
was not aware of the range of his arguments, nor of how often he
tried, nor how he pretended to make common cause with Charmian
Plaut because her own situation so much resembled his. Lucy had
often heard Mrs. Plaut's cruel jokes about the student tutorials–
the perfectly
morbid
insistence that they were
really
held in the dormi–
tories-but Lucy preferred to believe that her own tutorial in Seven–
teenth Century would be immune to such attacks, because of her
exertions to "be nice" to Mrs. Plaut. Naturally, that lady never
troubled to "be nice" to her; as Charmian Plaut always said, the
girls hated her anyhow, nice or not, so she felt she could afford the
luxury of a mean spirit, which was precisely the luxury her husband's
students could not afford. For all their advantages, those
infa'f!-tS
could not know how Craven interpreted Lucy Doob's presence at the
Plauts' that night, nor understand how Charmian tried to nourish
that interpretation. Nor how Professor Plaut himself liked to justify
his wife's apparent fantasy in order to keep another one out of her
mind, but this one a reality she hadn't yet imagined.
Donald Craven walked back with Lucy Doob. He coughed,
cursed the chilly air and the feeling of health it attempted to give
him, but he was not so desperate that he couldn't respond to a finely
encrusted pearly moon, or a glitter of ice on the path, or a
fa~ade
of evergreens at the end of the road. Nor was he too dissociated for
conversation. Lucy spoke pleasantly, with just the expected degree
of silly extravagance, but was perhaps intelligent-although her only
act of intelligence so far was a slight suspension of that eagerness. He
talked to her about Italy and then he told her about herself.
Lucy did not gape, as expected, nor ask how Craven could know
this about her. So Craven could hardly be flattered by her silence,
then
1
or
~ven
especially pleased by the way she
re~ard~d
him
1
bqt
