Stoner

Stoner nodded. "How far along are you in your course work?"

"I hope to finish within two years," Walker said.

"Well, that makes it easier," Stoner said. "I offer the seminar every year. It's really so full now that it's hardly a seminar any longer, and one more person would just about finish the job. Why can't you wait until next year if you really want the course?"

Walker's eyes shifted away from him. "Well, frankly," he said and flashed his smile again, "I'm the victim of a misunderstanding. All my own fault, of course. I didn't realize that each Ph.D. Student has to have at least four graduate seminars to get his degree, and I didn't take any at all last year. And as you know, they don't allow you to take more than one each semester. So if I'm to graduate in two years, I have to have one this semester."

Stoner sighed. "I see. So you don't really have a very special interest in the influence of the Latin tradition?"

"Oh, indeed I do, sir. Indeed I do. It will be most helpful in my dissertation."

"Mr. Walker, you should know this is a rather specialized class, and I don't encourage people to enter it unless they have a particular interest."

"Yes, sir," Walker said. "I assure you that I do have a particular interest."

Stoner nodded. "How is your Latin?"

Walker bobbed his head. "Oh, it's fine, sir. I haven't taken my Latin exam yet, but I read it very well."

"Do you have French or German?"

"Oh, yes, sir. Again, I haven't taken the exams yet; I thought I'd get them all out of the way at the same time, at the end of this year. But I read them both very well." Walker paused, then added, "Dr. Lomax said he thought I would surely be able to do the work in the seminar."

Stoner sighed. "Very well," he said. "Much of the reading will be in Latin, a little in French and German, though you might be able to get by without those. I'll give you a reading list, and we'll talk about your seminar topic next Wednesday afternoon."

Walker thanked him effusively and arose from his chair with some difficulty. "I'll get right on to the reading," he said. "I'm sure you won't regret letting me in your class, sir."

Stoner looked at him with faint surprise. "The question had not occurred to me, Mr. Walker," he said dryly. "I'll see you on Wednesday."

The seminar was held in a small basement room in the south wing of Jesse Hall. A dank but not unpleasant odor seeped from the cement walls, and feet shuffled in hollow whispers upon the bare cement floor. A single light hung from the ceiling in the center of the room and shone downward, so that those seated at desk-top chairs in the center of the room rested in a splash of brightness; but the walls were a dim gray and the corners were almost black, as if the smooth unpainted cement sucked in the light that streamed from the ceiling.

On that second Wednesday of the seminar William Stoner came into the room a few minutes late; he spoke to the students and began to arrange his books and papers on the small stained-oak desk that stood squatiy before the center of a blackboard wall. He glanced at the small group scattered about the room. Some of them he knew; two of the men were Ph.D. candidates whose work he was directing; four others were M.A. students in the department who had done undergraduate work with him; of the remaining students, three were candidates for advanced degrees in modern language, one was a philosophy student doing his dissertation on the Scholastics, one was a woman of advanced middle age, a high-school teacher trying to get an M.A. during her sabbatical, and the last was a dark-haired young woman, a new instructor in the department, who had taken a job for two years while she completed a dissertation she had begun after finishing her course work at an eastern university. She had asked Stoner if she might audit the seminar, and he had agreed that she might. Charles Walker was not among the group. Stoner waited a few moments more, shuffling his papers; then he cleared his throat and began the class.

"During our first meeting we discussed the scope of this seminar, and we decided that we should limit our study of the medieval Latin tradition to the first three of the seven liberal arts--that is, to grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic." He paused and watched the faces--tentative, curious, and masklike-- focus upon him and what he said.