I found excuses to drive down Scofield at least once a day. Cecie remarked on it.

"What are you going this way for?" she said, when I drove that way en route to Dairyland for a limeade one warm afternoon that first week.

"Why not? We never come this way," I said casually.

"Nobody does, who doesn't have to," she said. Scofield was an unlovely street of sagging small frame houses with garages behind them, melting into the earth and supported by honeysuckle and kudzu thickets. Many of these garages had been converted into student apartments; I knew that Paul Sibley lived in one.

"I just get tired of College Street," I said.

"You're the driver," Cecie said.

On Thursday of that week I saw him coming out of one of the garage apartments, and my heart gave a lizardlike leap in my chest, as if I had seen a wild animal or a fire raging. I stepped on the gas and swept by, eyes ahead. The number was 43 Scofield. I did not drive that way again. I was acutely embarrassed by my own behavior, and besides, now I had a context for him.

Talk about him was rife in McCandless Hall. He had captured our collective imagination as surely as if he wore a dark cloak and a slouch hat. I heard that he had made the best grades in architecture anyone ever had at North Carolina State, and that two of his student projects had been built. He had, it was said, won an international design competition while he was in Paris and, on the strength of it, had a job waiting for him in New York with the legendary McKim, Mead and White when he graduated from architecture school, providing that school was an American one. He had transferred to Randolph because it had a superb reputation for engineering and building technology and he wanted to learn that; he was purported to have said, at his application interview, that he did not think his own innate design ability needed much in the way of instruction. He was, indeed, very poor. He was half Seminole Indian. He had won regional races on a Harley Davidson in his youth, and had been a cycle racer of some note in France.

He was a widower. He had married a French girl, from Orleans, early in his stay there with the army, and she had been killed in a fall from the back of his cycle. He never spoke of her, and he did not race anymore. They had had no children.

No one knew the real truth of the talk, nor where it had its genesis. College students are inveterate and creative gossips. Their world is small and their imaginations still unsullied. But somehow I believed all of it. It was all of a piece with him. I had read The Fountainhead early on; all the design students had. When I looked at Paul Sibley, I saw Howard Roark. I think that I was utterly lost to him the day I heard about his young French wife, and the motorcycle.

Once a week, on Wednesdays, because his was the largest class held in McCandless that quarter, Louis Cooney grudgingly allowed announcements of general interest to design students to be made at the end of class. I was chairman that quarter of the special events committee for the school of art and architecture, and it fell to my lot, the second week of classes, to announce a film on Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, to be held in McCandless's small gallery. I began to dread the announcement days in advance. There was little chance of avoiding humiliation from Louis Cooney's tongue, and this time it would be before the dark Seminole eyes of Paul Sibley.

But at least he would see me; would have to. Could not avoid it. The Tuesday night before announcement day, I washed my hair and did my nails and gave myself a raw-egg facial. The next morning I got up early and put my hair up into the French knot that Cecie said looked so much like Old Money it ought to be dirty green, and applied more makeup more carefully than I ever used except for dates, and put on my treasured black cashmere sweater and good gray Irish tweed skirt from Jaeger, that was my last Christmas present from my father. I hesitated, looking under my lashes at Cecie's sleeping form, and then pulled out the string of pearls he had given me for my high school graduation and fastened them around my neck, and fled from our room. I did not want Cecie to wake and see me, I could not have said why. But as I closed the door softly and went down the hall, I felt the first pangs of guilt I had ever felt in connection with her.

My heart hammered and my mouth dried to parchment during the class, and I mentally rehearsed my short announcement over and over. When the time came and Louis Cooney said, "I believe our own incomparable Miss Lee has a tidbit of culture to offer us," I stood up, head light, eyes blind, and mispronounced Mussorgsky. I did not even get close. I heard it myself...Moosursky...and stood stricken dumb and mindless, unable to remember the correct pronunciation.

"Anyway, you all come," I blurted. "It's a good program and you'll like it."

There was general laughter, and even though I knew it was affectionate, I shrank into my seat and dropped my eyes to my notebook in utter humiliation. My body burnt in the fires of mortification from my waist to my hairline. I could feel tears of shame rising behind my lowered lashes. I waited dumbly to hear what Louis Cooney would say. He said it with swift, savage joy.

"Well, Miss Lee," he said. "Moosursky indeed. Oh, no, no, no. Not from one of your obvious distinction and cultivation, not to mention your splendid family pearls. Who'd have thought it? Might I just suggest that you invest some of your filthy lucre in a good dictionary?"

The class roared with uneasy laughter, and I laughed too, a blind idiot's bray, and went directly to the women's room and locked myself in a stall and flushed the toilet over and over, and cried. Then I dropped the pearls in my purse, took down my hair, washed my face, and slunk over to Harry's. I cut my next class. The next period was a lab, and everybody would be working; Harry's would be safe. I bought a cup of coffee and took it to a back booth and put a dime in the jukebox by the table and pressed "Unchained Melody," and buried my nose in my steaming cup. I tried very hard to will my mind blank and cool, and succeeded. I don't know how long I sat there.

I heard no sound, but I looked up and he was there, in the seat across from me. He was not smiling, and then he did. I had never seen him smile before. It transformed the dark face entirely. I felt my mouth curve into an answering smile of its own volition.

"I told Harry you were buying," he said, gesturing at his coffee. "Since you're so rich, I thought you'd spring this time."

"I'm not rich," I said. I found it hard to make my voice work. "I could kill Cooney for that."

"Forget him. He's a turd, and a queer one at that," he said. "He wishes he looked like you, and since he can't, he's going to punish you for it. He can't, you know, if you don't let him."

"How can you stop him?"

"By not caring," he said. "By not giving a flying fuck."

I used the word myself, to Cecie, mainly, but I was not accustomed to hearing it from men. I felt the hated red crawl up into my neck and face again. His grin deepened.

"S'cuse me," he said. "I forgot. You poor little rich girls aren't accustomed to such functional things. I like the blush, though. Do they pass it along with the family pearls?"

"The pearls are fake," I muttered. Under the embarrassment I felt an aching disappointment. Please don't be like this, I said silently to him.

"Uh huh," he said. "Look, I don't care if you have money. It's nice. You can buy the coffee all the time. You can even pay for the movies and the pizzas. I have, to my entire name, two pairs of khakis and three shirts and one pair of tennis shoes and a G.I. Bill check every month, and that's it. But I didn't pick you out because of it."

"Have you picked me out?" I said. I could scarcely breathe over the pounding of my heart. I was terrified that he would hear it.

"Yep."

"Why?"

"Because I like the way you look," Paul Sibley said. "And I like the way you talk-or don't-and I like it that you don't giggle. And you're talented; I went in and looked at your board. And you're smart. I know you can pronounce Mussorgsky, no matter what that asshole says. And you're not like the others."

"How do you mean?" I said faintly. I watched him steadily, hypnotized like a bird by a snake. It struck me suddenly that his nose had been broken.

"You're just different. You must know by now that you are. So am I. I thought we might as well be different together."

"Do you always come on like this with girls?" I said. I could not think of anything clever, profound, or even basically intelligent to say.

"No," he said. "Only one time before."

I knew he meant the girl who had been his wife, and was silent. I could not think of anything to say. The silence between us spun out, and finally, I said, "I have to go now," and rose. He watched me without speaking, and I turned and walked away.

"See you tomorrow," he called after me. I nodded without looking back. Joy started up; I knew it would soon flood me.

"Hey, Kate?" he called after me once more. This time I did turn.

"Don't forget to pay Harry for my coffee," he grinned.

I paid for the coffee and left Harry's, laughing and near tears with the rising of the joy. I do not remember driving the MG back across campus to the Tri O house.

I was sitting in the twilight looking out my window when Cecie came in from her lab.

"What's the matter?" she said, her radar instantly alert.

I did not turn to look at her. I could not. I was profoundly and viscerally reluctant to speak; I actually dreaded the words. But I said them.

"I've met somebody," I said.

She was quiet for what seemed a very long time.

"Oh, Katie," she said then. "Oh, Kate."

And so it began, that spring that took all my deep aches and diffused yearnings, all my subterranean fires and storms and tears and laughter, all my buried hungers and thirsts and terrors, and focused them on the dark face and body of Paul Sibley. The spring of becoming. Not everyone has such a season; I had not thought it would come to me. If I looked far ahead at all, I saw myself, Kate the child, only older, and in a different place. But now I looked and saw a woman I did not know, and I was both tremulously grateful for her, and terrified. She was all appetite and response, and she had no boundaries.

From the very beginning I wanted him physically, fiercely and sometimes even savagely; I would sit across from him at Harry's, or beside him at his board, and I would be weak and almost sick with the longing for him to touch me. I felt every inch of warm, thick air on my skin, wherever my clothes were not, and so wanted to feel his hands there on me that I grew dizzy from it, and blushed. In the secret places beneath my clothes, the longing was so particular and piercing that I was frightened and appalled, and wondered in shame if people around us could read the stigmata of it on my face. I had never felt anything like it before.

I remembered my voice, not so long ago, to Cecie: "I can't imagine wanting to do it with anybody," and her cool one, to me: "I can if it's the right somebody. That's everything." So here it was, that imagining, that somebody. This was it then. I would like to have told her she was right, but I would have died before I would have spoken of it to anyone, even Cecie. Especially airborne Cecie. This feeling was in every way of earth and flesh. Every day after that first one, in Harry's, I sat beside Paul and laughed lightly and talked glibly and listened in cool amusement, and came near to shuddering apart with this thing that I could not control, and could not abjure. I think, if he had touched me, even on the arm, even on the hand, I would have bolted like a spooked horse.

But he didn't. He did not so much as indicate that he might like to. He smiled, and teased me, and sometimes laughed aloud at me, and asked me questions about myself, and listened while I answered, and he talked. Mostly, he talked. He talked, and I listened. I would have listened to him forever. He talked, in those early days, about architecture, and what it meant to him, and what he wanted to give it, and what he wanted it to give him. I could not imagine that all of it would not come true. He was awesomely, slashingly talented, almost savagely disciplined, in love with architecture as he would be with a woman, with a dark and obsessive joy. The sketches and elevations and designs that piled up on and around his board were soaring things, seemingly formed of earth and air and steel and stone, and they were where he put his passion and his touch. I was envious of his work that spring. I wanted that wholeness for myself.

He wanted to do residential architecture. Just that.

"I don't want to do habitats for cat food and potato chips, or for places where people hurt and die, or for assholes who make rules for other assholes," he said. "I want to do places where people live, and where there are no rules but mine and the house's, and the site's."

"What about the people who live in the houses?" I said.

"Their rules will be the same as mine, or they wouldn't hire me, and I wouldn't work for them," he said.

"You really do sound like Howard Roark," I said. I knew that he had read the book.

"He was an asshole, too," Paul said.

"No, he wasn't! Why?" I cried. This was heresy. I had never heard an architecture student say this.

"Because he blew up his own work," he said. "No real architect would do that."

"It was to keep it from being...sullied...by idiots," I said.

"Better just to shoot the idiots," Paul said.

"Well, you're going to have a hard time at McKim, Mead and White, then," I said. "They're not going to take it kindly when you refuse to build cat food plants or call your residential clients assholes, much less shoot them."

"I know it," he said soberly. "I don't know how I'm going to handle that. I don't know if I can handle that. If there was any way on earth to just start out with my own practice, I'd do it, but there isn't. I don't have any money and there's no way to get any. Not even any family to steal it from. McKim was the best I could do, and I'm going to do it for the very minimum amount of time I have to, to build a practice. But Jesus, it's going to take years..."

"Paul, it's one of the best firms in the world," I said. "Everybody I know would kill to work for them. I would."

"You could," he said. "You're good enough. They have an interiors department, one of the biggest in the country. Maybe I'll take you along when I go. Make it a condition of employment. It's not a bad idea, come to think of it. Might make the slave labor easier to take."

I was faintly stung, that he seemed to think I would need the entree of his auspices for a job with such a firm as McKim, Mead and White, but I knew that he was probably right. The firm would be flooded each year with newly graduated applicants. Talent would not be enough.

"You think a word from you would do it?" I said tartly. Under the acid my heart sang. He was talking in terms of the far future.

He looked at me gravely.

"Yes," he said.

"Well, for your information, I was going to New York anyway, after graduation," I said. "And a lot sooner than you are. If I go to summer school this summer I can double up, and do my thesis in the fall, and graduate at Christmas. I'll be there a good two years before you will."

"Good. Then you can stake out the territory and find a loft or something. Pay for it, too, since you'll be a career woman."

I did not know if he meant for myself or for both of us, but my heart began a pounding that made speech impossible.

"Hah," I managed, idiotically.

He laughed.

"Don't knock me down accepting my offer," he said. "Thank God for you, Kate. If you hung on to me I don't think I could stand it."

And he bent back over the drawing that was sprouting like a flower or a tree on his board, and I leaned back on my stool to try and slow my runaway heart. What was he doing to me? He spoke of apartments in New York together, of a future that included me, and then of my not hanging on to him. Was the dichotomy purposeful? Did he even know he was doing it? In addition to being hopelessly in love that spring, I was painfully and permanently off-balance. It would have helped, I think, if I could have talked to someone about him. But I did not think that I could. He was in another country from anyone I knew at Randolph.

I did not see him at night; he did not make any effort to see me then, and I could not bring myself to mention it. I knew that he worked at his board far into the nights, and in any case, I did not know where we could have met. I was loath to hang around his lab; men habitually worked late at their boards in McCandless, but women normally did not. I could not even imagine him on the brocade sofas in the Tri Omega drawing room, and could imagine myself even less in the shabby little garage apartment on Scofield. In any case, women students were not permitted in men's rooms and apartments, on campus or off. And I knew without knowing how that it would simply never occur to him to take me to a movie or to get a hamburger. I supposed, bleakly, that I was doomed to see him in an endless succession of afternoon booths at Harry's. And so I spent my nights as I always had, with Cecie, or studying at the library, or dating this fraternity boy or that, all the while the fact of Paul Sibley roaring in my blood like a fever, unseen and consuming.

Only once did Cecie mention him.

"What happened to that somebody you met?" she said casually, not looking up from her history textbook. Her head was bent beneath the desk lamp for better light, and her copper curls flamed in it. She was wearing an oxford-cloth shirt, an outsized one, and she looked in it like a little boy dressed up in his father's clothing. She looked, suddenly, very thin; her neck in the drooping collar of the shirt seemed as fragile as a lily's stem, and her collarbones stood out in sharp relief. It seemed a very long time since I had really seen Cecie.

"Oh, he's around," I said. "I have coffee with him sometimes in the afternoons. Probably nothing will come of it. He's even poorer than you and me and Fig, and he works all the time. He's going to be one of the architects we'll remember out of this century."

She looked up and smiled. There were lavender smudges in the thin skin under her eyes, and the faint stain of golden copper that usually lay just beneath the skin of her cheeks was gone. Her pointed face was pale.

"He sounds nice," she said. "Does he have a name, or shall we just call him Louie?"

"Paul Sibley," I said, feeling my cheeks flame at the sound and taste of his name on my lips. "Are you not feeling good, Cece? You don't look like you are."

"I'm tired, is all," she said. "I can't seem to get my ass in gear, as Ginger says. I've got this research thing on English Common Law coming up next quarter, that's going to take two whole damn quarters to finish; I won't be done with it till Christmas, and I'm trying to double up in history this quarter to clear some time for it. But it's awfully hard, for some reason. I feel like I'm wading through molasses."

"Why don't we drop a hint to Ginger that the Outer Banks might not be amiss between quarters?" I said.

"Can't," she said, taking off her glasses and rubbing her eyes. "Aunt Eugenia wants to go to the Holy Land with her Circle, and there won't be anybody with Grammy. I need to read Keynes, anyway."

"God, I wish school was over, that I was out of here, that we were. I wish we were already in New York, or Europe," I said, suddenly restless and uneasy. I longed suddenly and with all my heart for the days before Paul Sibley, when the future meant endless days, bright past imagining, in the quicksilver company of Cecie Hart. I missed her, acutely and painfully, as if she did not sit here in the room with me.

"You're wishing your life away," she said lightly. "That's what the sisters always told us when we wanted time to pass."

She did not comment on New York or Europe. Presently I put out my light, and slid into an unquiet sleep. Her light was still burning when I finally drifted off.

On the last day of classes I loaded the MG and dropped Cecie off at the train station. We were not going to be apart long...both of us would be back in three weeks, for summer school. But I felt suddenly chilly and peculiarly vulnerable, as if I stood on a plain ringed with forests, and in those forests eyes were watching. I felt as if someone, either Cecie or I, were not coming back.

"Well...see you in June," I said, still not moving away in the car.

"Yep," she said. "Toujours: Tomorrow is another day, Katie Scarlett."

"Oh...bye!" I called out, laughing, and put the car into gear.

"Bye," floated back to me from the closing door of the station. I stepped on the gas and drove a block or so toward the southbound highway that would take me to Kenmore and the dank, peeling house and the light-eyed deacon and the primmouthed stranger who was my mother now, and then I swung into the driveway of the post office and turned the car around and drove back up College Street and turned left on the street that ran past McCandless Hall. It was twilight, and a few lights bloomed in the big bay of windows, but most of the boards were empty.

Across the street, Harry's glowed bright with supper lights, and the marquee on the Tiger Theatre advertised La Strada. In the coin laundry I saw a few figures, the faceless shadow band, none of whom I knew, who did not go home between quarters. It was a desolate and banal little street scene; but suddenly as dear and precious and full of splendor and nuance as any I had ever seen. This was home. That other place, on the Santee River, was...anathema. I felt a surge of simple longing that hurt my heart and brought tears scalding to my eyes. They ran over and down my face, and I tasted the salt of them. I could feel my mouth working. I pulled the MG into a parking place in front of Harry's and got out and ran across the street to McCandless, and up the dark, echoing concrete stairs to the third floor where the architecture lab was. At first I thought it was empty, but then I saw his dark head bent over his board, far in the back of the room. The only light came from the drafting light clamped to its edge.

He raised his head and looked at me. We had said our carefully casual goodbyes earlier, over coffee, but somehow I did not think he was surprised to see me. He stared at me levelly. I stood in the doorway feeling as foolish as it was possible to feel, trying not to cry.

He grinned then, and gestured me to him with his T square, and before I knew it I was sitting in my accustomed place on the stool next to his, and he was leaning on his board and grinning the white grin at me. His hands were in his pockets, and his head was cocked to one side. The comma of hair fell into his eyebrows. I did not think I had ever seen so wonderful-looking a man. I grinned back, feeling the color rise from my collar.

"Forget something?" he said.

"Nope. Remembered something," I said, trying to match his tone. "I remembered you'd never seen La Strada and it's on over at the Tiger, and I came to take you to the movies."

He did not move, and the grin did not fade.

"Want to go over to Harry's and call home first?" he said.