and had sparse hair. She was a Daughter of the Confederacy and wore the badge constantly on her starched waists.
He thought of her only as a very chill and respectable woman. He played Casino—the only game he knew—with her and the other boarders, and called her “ma’am.” Then one night she took his hand, saying she would show him how to make love to a girl. She tickled the palm, put it around her waist, lifted it to her breast, and plumped over on his shoulder, breathing stertorously through her pinched nostrils and saying, “God, boy!” over and over. He plunged around the dark cool streets until three in the morning, wondering what he would do about it. Then he came back to the sleeping house, and crept on shoeless feet into her room. Fear and disgust were immediate. He climbed the hills to ease his tortured spirit and stayed away from the house for hours. But she would follow him down the halls or open her door suddenly on him, clad in a red kimono. She became very ugly and bitter, and accused him of betraying, dishonoring, and deserting her. She said that where she came from—the good old State of South Carolina—a man who treated a woman in such fashion would get a bullet in him. Eugene thought of new lands. He was in an agony of repentance and guilty abasement: he framed a long plea for pardon and included it in his prayers at night, for he still prayed, not from devout belief, but from the superstition of habit and number, muttering a set formula over sixteen times, while he held his breath. Since childhood he had believed in the magical efficacy of certain numbers—on Sunday he would do only the second thing that came into his head and not the first—and this intricate ritual of number and prayer he was a slave to, not to propitiate God, but to fulfil a mysterious harmonic relation with the universe, or to pay worship to the demonic force that brooded over him. He could not sleep of nights until he did this.
Eliza finally grew suspicious of the woman, picked a quarrel with her, and ejected her.
No one said very much to him about going to Harvard. He himself had no very clear reason for going, and only in September, a few days before the beginning of the term, decided to go. He talked about it at intervals during the summer, but, like
