The day fitted with his superficially dull and lethargic mood. Instead of the cool spell that should have followed the storm, there was a hot foretaste of summer in the air. Student absences rose sharply. Those who came to class were inattentive, and exhibited other symptoms of spring fever. Only Bronstein seemed animated. He kept drawing Norman's other students aside by twos and threes, and whispering to them heatedly. Norman found out that he was trying to get up a petition of protest on Sawtelle's appointment. Norman asked him to stop it. Bronstein refused, but in any case he seemed to be failing in the job of arousing the other students. Norman's lectures were languid. He contented himself with transforming his notes into accurate verbal statements with a minimum of mental effort. He watched the pencils move methodically as notes were taken, or wander off into intricate doodles. Two girls were engrossed in sketching the handsome profile of the fraternity president in the second row. He watched foreheads wrinkle as they picked up the thread of his lecture, smooth out again as they dropped it. And all the while his own mind was wandering off on side tracks. They were too fugitive, too much like daydreams to be called thoughts. One began when he recalled the epigram about a lecture being a process of transferring the contents of the teacher's notebook into the notebooks of the students, without allowing it to pass through the minds of either. That made him think of mimeographing. Mimeograph, it went on. Margaret van Nice. Theodore Jennings. Gun. Windowpane. Galileo. Scroll--(Sheer away from that! Forbidden territory.) The daydream backtracked and took a different turning. Jennings. Gunnison. Pollard. President. Emperor. Empress. Juggler. Tower. Hanged man--(Hold on! Don't go any further.) As the long dull day wore on, the daydreams gradually assumed a uniform coloration. Gun. Knife. Sliver. Broken glass. Nail. Tetanus. War. Mangled bodies. Mayhem. Murder. Rope. Hangman. (Sheer off again!) Gas, Poison. The coloration of blood and physical injury. And ever more strongly, he felt the breath-like pulsations of the monster in the depths of his mind, dreaming nightmares of carnage from which it would soon awake and heave up out of the mud. And he powerless to stop it. It was as if a crusted-over swamp, swollen with underground water, were pushing up the seemingly healthy ground above by imperceptible degrees--nearing the point when it would burst through in one vast slimy eruption. * * * * * Starting home, Norman fell in with Mr. Carr. "Good evening, Norman," said the old gentleman, lifting his Panama hat to mop his forehead, which merged into an extensive bald area. "Good evening, Linthicum," said Norman. But his mind was occupied with speculating how, if a man let a thumbnail grow and then sharpened it carefully, he could cut the veins of his wrist and so bleed to death.