PART I
CHAPTER ONE
Jean Norris came slowly down the Library steps, passed the Chemistry Building, and took the worn path across the campus to the brush-lined creek. The hot stubble burned through her white canvas shoes and fine, gray dust powdered the mortarboard and black graduating gown she carried over her arm. With one stride she crossed the trickle of water and scrambled up the opposite bank.
"Lord!" She drew a deep breath of the shaded coolness and, taking off the mortarboard, ran the tips of her fingers under the heavy plait of pale brown hair. "Thank God this day is nearly over." She dropped to the carpet of dead leaves under the scrub oak and, with her knees drawn up to her chin and her arms clasped about them, looked out through the lattice of green. With definite appraisal her gray eyes went slowly from one building to another, out across the parched campus, past the grateful green of the entrance oaks, to the strip of town beyond and the Bay, glittering in the hot May sun. A tolerant smile flicked the corners of her mouth.
It was over at last. The four long, interminable years had culminated in a series of fitting ceremonies. All day streams of students had flowed through the buildings, swept the campus, overflowed into the town. Well dressed parents from San Francisco and country parents, uncomfortable in their unusual clothes, had rushed helplessly about, harassed by the necessity of remembering many directions, of being in certain spots at certain moments, of not asking foolish questions and so disgracing their children. Flustered and important, the graduating class had appropriated the earth.
Through the throng, instructors and assistant professors had moved with weary, anxious faces as if, in the graduating of each class, they heard another hour strike in the clock of their lives. Committees, distinct with colored badges, exhausted with importance, had misread hours and locations, given directions in college vernacular so explicit that no stranger could understand them, overlapped, performed one another's duties, apologized, pretended it was all going smoothly. Everywhere well-bred, managed confusion had exuded like a fog.
Exactly at twelve, in a silence so intense that even the sun hung waiting in the zenith, the graduating class had wound its last solemn pilgrimage across the campus. First the aged president, bent, as if in scholastic humility, beneath the great weight of his Doctor's scarlet hood. Then the guests of honor, sleek and prosperous men, followed by the professors in order of their rank and departments, and finally five hundred students, two by two, awed by the seriousness of what lay before them.
To Jean it had seemed hours while the aged president piped of Life's ideals, the security of college, the pitfalls of the world. Each May, for twenty years, he had stood so, each year a little more bent, and piped of the world beyond. Parents had furtively wiped their eyes and students made heroic resolves.
Then, with a trembling gesture of his strengthless hands, he had offered the graduating class to Life. One by one they had filed up, received their diplomas and hurried back to their places under scattered puffs of applause from relatives. It had seemed to Jean that it would never end, but forever black gowned figures would be going forward to get slender rolls of white paper.