Stoner

She said, "Oh, I know. Once a man gets in his forties. But really, Willy, you're old enough to be her father, aren't you?"

It had not occurred to him how he must appear to an outsider, to the world. For a moment he saw himself as he must thus appear; and what Edith said was part of what he saw. He had a glimpse of a figure that flitted through smoking-room anecdotes, and through the pages of cheap fiction--a pitiable fellow going into his middle age, misunderstood by his wife, seeking to renew his youth, taking up with a girl years younger than himself, awkwardly and apishly reaching for the youth he could not have, a fatuous, garishly got-up clown at whom the world laughed out of discomfort, pity, and contempt. He looked at this figure as closely as he could; but the longer he looked, the less familiar it became. It was not himself that he saw, and he knew suddenly that it was no one.

But he knew that the world was creeping up on him, up on Katherine, and up on the little niche of it that they had thought was their own; and he watched the approach with a sadness of which he could not speak, even to Katherine.

The fall semester began that September in an intensely colorful Indian summer that came after an early frost. Stoner returned to his classes with an eagerness that he had not felt for a long time; even the prospect of facing a hundred freshman faces did not dim the renewal of his energy.

His life with Katherine continued much as it had been before, except that with the return of the students and many of the faculty he began to find it necessary to practice circumspection. During the summer the old house where Katherine lived had been almost deserted; they had been able thus to be together in almost complete isolation, with no fear that they might be noticed. Now William had to exercise caution when he came to her place in the afternoon; he found himself looking up and down the street before he approached the house, and going furtively down the stairs to the little well that opened into her apartment.

They thought of gestures and talked of rebellion; they told each other that they were tempted to do something outrageous, to make a display. But they did not, and they had no real desire to do so. They wanted only to be left alone, to be themselves; and, wanting this, they knew they would not be left alone and they suspected that they could not be themselves. They imagined themselves to be discreet, and it hardly occurred to them that their affair would be suspected. They made a point of not encountering each other at the University, and when they could not avoid meeting publicly, they greeted each other with a formality whose irony they did not believe to be evident.

But the affair was known, and known very quickly after the fall semester began. It was likely that the discovery came out of the peculiar clairvoyance that people have about such matters; for neither of them had given an outward sign of their private lives. Or perhaps someone had made an idle speculation that had a ring of truth to someone else, which caused a closer regard of them both, which in turn . . . Their speculations were, they knew, to no end; but they continued to make them.

There were signs by which both knew that they were discovered. Once, walking behind two male graduate students, Stoner heard one say, half in admiration and half in contempt, "Old Stoner. By God, who would have believed it?"--and saw them shake their heads in mockery and puzzlement over the human condition. Acquaintances of Katherine made oblique references to Stoner and offered her confidences about their own love-lives that she had not invited.

What surprised them both was that it did not seem to matter. No one refused to speak to them; no one gave them black looks; they were not made to suffer by the world they had feared. They began to believe that they could live in the place they had thought to be inimical to their love, and live there with some dignity and ease.

Over the Christmas holiday Edith decided to take Grace for a visit with her mother in St. Louis; and for the only time during their life together William and Katherine were able to be with each other for an extended period.

Separately and casually, both let it be known that they would be away from the University during the Christmas holiday; Katherine was to visit relatives in the East, and William was to work at the bibliographical center and museum in Kansas City. At different hours they took separate buses, and met at Lake Ozark, a resort village in the outlying mountains of the great Ozark range.

They were the only guests of the only lodge in the village that remained open the year around; and they had ten days together.

There had been a heavy snow three days before their arrival, and during their stay it snowed again, so that the gently rolling hills remained white all the time they were there.