"We used to do this at Gorham," she murmured. "When I was taking your classes, and you were the serious young instructor. Until I found out you weren't any different from the college boys—only better. Remember?"
He nodded and took her hand. He looked down at the town, made out the campus, with its prominent floodlights designed to chase couples out of dark corners. Those garishly floodlighted Gothic buildings seemed for the moment to symbolize a whole world of barren intellectual competition and jealous traditionalism, a world toward which at the moment he felt as alien as if he were still twenty-six instead of forty-one and Tansy twenty-one instead of thirty-six.
"I wonder if that's why they hate us so?" he said, almost without thinking.
"Whatever are you talking about?" But the question sounded lazy.
"I mean the rest of the faculty, or most of them. Is it because we can do things like this?"
She laughed. "So you're actually coming alive. We don't do things like this so very often, you know."
He kept on with his idea. "It's a devilishly competitive and jealous life. The war, doing away with some of it, makes you more conscious of the rest. And competition in an institution can be nastier than any other, because it's so tight. Think so?"
"I've lived with it for years," said Tansy, simply.
"Of course, it's all very petty. But petty emotions can come to outweigh big ones. Their size is better suited to the human mind."
He looked down at Hempnell, and tried to visualize the amount of ill will and jealousy he had inevitably accumulated for himself. He felt a slight chill creeping around. He realized where this train of thought was leading. The darker half of his mind loomed up ominously.