A scurry to the platform, as the through express rolled in. Bill, relinquishing her bags to the porter, seized her hand in a hard clasp, and stood, bareheaded, below her on the platform shouting, "Good luck!" as she was carried with increasing rush away.
III
Catherine, braced against the shivers and jounces of the old Ford taxi, wondered inertly what it would feel like to live in such a town, in one of those two-story frame houses, with a corrugated iron garage in the rear, and grayish lace curtains at the windows, with smoke-blackened sparrows scrapping in the front yard, and drifting, curling feathers of soot in the dingy air. I could plan a town like this with a ruler, she thought. A straight line for the business street, a few parallel lines, a few right-angled lines: dots for churches, one of each kind; for moving-picture theaters; for schools; small squares for yards and houses. Factories along the railroad, pouring up the blanket of smoke under which the town lay. Was that the soul of the town, that close-hanging smoke, with its drifting feathers of soot? And then, out at the edge, where the frame houses were far apart, scattered, a handful of college buildings, in medieval isolation. When she had said "Hope College" to the driver, he had shrieked to a baggage master, "Hi, Chuck! Where's Hope Collidge, d'yuh know?"
"Out past the lunatic asylum. You know, down the car track."
Hope College, typical of the small denominational institutions offering a normal certificate. So Dr. Roberts had classified it.
That must be the lunatic asylum, that group of brick buildings with prison windows. They were well out of town, now, the cab skidding and jerking over deep ruts. Gray, flat, interminable fields under a flat gray sky. It's like a dream, thought Catherine, a funny, burlesque of a dream, with me rattling along.
"This it, lady?" The taxi shivered in all its bolts as it halted, and the driver poked his head in at the door. There was a driveway winding between two rows of small blotched poplar trunks, and back from the road two square brick buildings, scrawled over with black network of old vines.
"I don't know."
"Guess it must be." He slammed the door and whirred up the driveway.
Just as Catherine climbed the steps, still moving vaguely in a dream burlesque, a clangor of bells burst out, followed by the clamp of feet, the sound of voices released. She opened the heavy door, and stepped into the hall. The sense of dream vanished; this was real enough. Opposite the door rose the central stairs of the building, twisting up in a dimly lighted well. Up and down them climbed young people, girls, a few boys. Shabby, gaudy, flippant, serious—Catherine watched them, with a sharp resurgence of all her shining belief, her keen, exciting delight in the thing she had come for.