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saw the girl who became his wife, she was wearing bobby socks, leaning seductively against his desk, and asking him questions about the next day’s assignment. She stood out from all of his other students, not only because she was a Northerner, but because she was more flamboyant; less unsure of herself, and almost patronizing toward Ficklin, at those times when she would corner him before or after class, or encounter him on campus. There was always a streak of bright color about her; a fire-colored scarf, an angora sweater of deep azure, or a brilliant kelly-green stripe down a quiet gray dress; something arresting in her attire that seemed to parallel the wild streak of independence in her personality.
    She would meet him on the library steps quite by accident, knowing him no better than any of his other students; and stopping, smiling up at him with her large shining green eyes, she would say something like: “Why, hello, Professor Ficklin! Isn’t it a gorgeous day. But you look a little tired, hmmm? I think you ought to just relax a little more.”
    Coming from any other co-ed, Bill Ficklin would have simply ignored the remark and the searching look. He was one of the youngest members of the faculty; and he was a bachelor, so he was accustomed to the whims and fancies of many of the girls he taught; accustomed and somewhat heavily resigned — but Marianne Powell affected him vaguely, though from the very beginning he was not certain why that was.
    â€œIt’s quite simple,” a colleague remarked one evening in the faculty lounge, after he had been chiding Bill about his “tender tête-à-têtes” with a student — and Bill Ficklin had admitted his fascination with Marianne — ”she’s pretty. She’s gay. And you’re falling in love with her.”
    Ficklin’s marriage to Marianne at the year’s end created a mild scandal in university circles. There was seventeen years’ difference in their ages; and while Bill Ficklin was a rather conscientious, serious, but by no means timid or puritanical, man — she was a quite frivolous, capricious nineteen years old.
    Whenever they had a disagreement, such as the one this morning about Major Post, Bill Ficklin always thought as he thinks now: nine years have sobered her considerably beyond the point he had expected when he had first married her. At twenty-eight she is still pretty and young and gay; yet more and more an irritating rigidity is cropping into her personality, coupled with a vague restlessness. It still irks Ficklin to recall her last summer’s suggestion (which he had rejected with an unprecedented burst of temper) that they take separate vacations, even though she had insisted, after his rage was spent, that she had only been thinking of him.
    This noon he had come home for lunch and found her near to angry tears because young Major Post, after emptying trash, had not replaced the cans in the cellar. She had demanded that while Bill Ficklin drove her to the band rehearsal at the Methodist Church, they stop off in town and try to find Major and make him return and finish his chore. Often, in between the Negro’s morning job at the Ficklins and his afternoon job up at the Hooper’s, he ate his lunch down under the trees across the street from the county courthouse. The small area there where the local Negroes were prone to gather was known in Paradise as “Black Patch”; but when Ficklin glanced over there as he was parking his car, he saw no sign of Major Post.
    â€œGet out anyway,” his wife said, “and ask Doc Sell. He’s right there, Fick.” She had pointed out the coroner on the bench. “He knows Major.”
    So Ficklin is doing as she directed now — reluctantly, and somewhat puzzled at her determination in such a small matter; but it is too hot to argue.
    In Paradise, people like Bill Ficklin; but they say he’s got a weakness that