The coffee at the cafeteria had a sour taste that morning, hastily swallowed amid a rattle of dishes on tin trays and shrill talk. Fanshaw was peevishly telling himself this was the last year he'd lead this dog's life, getting up out of bed this way every morning to hear a lot of young nincompoops make themselves ridiculous about the history of painting. If only it weren't for Mother, all the things he would be able to do! Crossing the yard, he began to feel better. His unbuckled arctics clinked cheerfully as he walked. The groups of boys in brown hats at the doors of the lecture halls, the tattoo of springy footsteps on the boardwalks, the ringing voices and the softmoulded cheeks flushed by the rain spun a net about him warm and full of freshness that gave him a sense of being within protecting walls and proceeding nonchalantly towards some aim. What else could he do that would give him such pleasant surroundings, and freedom for part of the year. And this youth always welling up about him. He sat down at the yellow-varnished desk in the semicircular lecture hall that smelt of chalk and turpentine that drifted in from the Museum, pushed off his arctics and strolled about, chatting with students and giving an occasional glance at his watch. Of course he might try being agent for some dealer, he was thinking as he talked. There was money to be made that way. Awfully low, of course. Still, for a year in Italy, to talk endlessly with good friends like Wenny and Nan at supper-tables in the moonlight in a smell of roses. The class was under way, would soon be over. That story overheard in a smoker about a rose. How disgusting, nauseating; one couldn't keep things like that out of one's head. "Rubens," he was saying. "No, I don't see why we should waste much time on Rubens, Mr. Jones; more acreage than intensity in Rubens, and all of it smeared with raspberry jam." The class laughed.