His situation was akin to that of the legendary hero who must travel through a long and narrow corridor, without once touching the morbidly enticing, poisoned walls.
He knew he could not avoid contact with them indefinitely, but in the meantime the thought-cysts might shrink and disappear.
The day fitted with his superficially dull and lethargic mood. Instead of the cool spell that should have followed the storm, there was a hot foretaste of summer in the air. Student absences rose sharply. Those who came to class were inattentive, and exhibited other symptoms of spring fever.
Only Bronstein seemed animated. He kept drawing Norman's other students aside by twos and threes, and whispering to them heatedly. Norman found out that he was trying to get up a petition of protest on Sawtelle's appointment. Norman asked him to stop it. Bronstein refused, but in any case he seemed to be failing in the job of arousing the other students.
Norman's lectures were languid. He contented himself with transforming his notes into accurate verbal statements with a minimum of mental effort. He watched the pencils move methodically as notes were taken, or wander off into intricate doodles. Two girls were engrossed in sketching the handsome profile of the fraternity president in the second row. He watched foreheads wrinkle as they picked up the thread of his lecture, smooth out again as they dropped it.
And all the while his own mind was wandering off on side tracks. They were too fugitive, too much like daydreams to be called thoughts.
One began when he recalled the epigram about a lecture being a process of transferring the contents of the teacher's notebook into the notebooks of the students, without allowing it to pass through the minds of either. That made him think of mimeographing.
Mimeograph, it went on. Margaret van Nice. Theodore Jennings. Gun. Windowpane. Galileo. Scroll—(Sheer away from that! Forbidden territory.)
The daydream backtracked and took a different turning. Jennings. Gunnison. Pollard. President. Emperor. Empress. Juggler. Tower. Hanged man—(Hold on! Don't go any further.)
As the long dull day wore on, the daydreams gradually assumed a uniform coloration.