Extreme Magic Read Free Page B

exercise in comparative humanity—he had merely to be.
    A passing car slowed, and the driver, unknown to him, called out, “Lift?”
    “Walking, thanks,” said Weil, thinking of how often he would have to say this until the new students got used to his intransigence, born of a youth spent with alpenstocks. For here, this near the automotive Rome, driving a car on the shortest haul had nothing to do with economy or abstinence. Even the poorest student might have his secondhand leviathan; Weil himself had his Pontiac at home.
    Passing under McFarland’s open windows, he waved up at the president’s housekeeper, who was airing the living room against a background of teal-dark wall. A good many of the Pittston parlors had taken on this color in the three years since the president’s mother had chosen it for hers. And at the curb, McFarland’s new two-tone Buick shone in silver-blu beauty, Rhadamanthine sign that by next year or so, other two-tone jobs, less violent in color of course than some that were floating the highways like zooming banana splits, would be chosen by those of the faculty who were “turning theirs in.” He would keep his old one as long as he could. Whether from age, or from that creeping anti-Americanism which so often flawed the recipients of American bounty, he had begun to have a horror of turning things in.
    And now, just ahead of him, was Mrs. Mabie’s. As Mr. Pines, presently riding undreaming through Pennsylvania or Ohio, might well say, once he got to know her—now he was for it. Professor Weil’s affectionate remembrance of London and the English went deep, deeper than the language lilt and the old gray streets, down to that sudden rest of the heart when he had stepped off the Dutch plane into a ring of their steady, un-Wagnerian faces. Its compound would already have been working in him, at the good thought of young Pines, had he not been all too sure of what was already working in Mrs. Mabie.
    Portia-Lou Mabie, a quondam painter known at her own insistence by her maiden-professional name of Potter (and therefore a constant twinge of explanation in the salons of Pittston and in poor old Mabie-Potter), was an unsuccessful faculty wife who was the more annoying because she gave no sign of knowing it. She was not, however, of that familiar sort, objects of pity, who were always twenty-three sour diapers too late for the Inter-Faith Tea. Dr. Mabie had met and been married by her while he was on a field trip to Mexico City, where—in common with others from St. Louis, Stroudsburg, Orlando—she had been leading the stridulant life of Greenwich Village when it hits the corrida. A bony princesse lointaine of about thirty-five, who wore her hair in a weak-lemonade waterfall down the small of her back, she was to Weil a confirmation of his private opinion that art historians ought never to come that close to art. She had a talent for endorsing the worthiest convictions in a way that made their very holders wish immediately to disavow them. Openly lamenting that she had been born too late to join the Left Bank expatriates of the Twenties, her shrill disparagements of the crass standardization of life in the United States brought a sudden flush of amor patriae to the most disaffected cheek. And ever since the Mabies’ recent Fulbright year at Oxford, her conversation, fresh with Anglophiliac sighs and knowing locutions, was likely to become especially matey in the presence of Hans Weil—climaxing on the occasion of the Weils’ yearly dinner for the McFarlands, when he had had to explain to the elderly wife of a Kansas divine what Mrs. Mabie had meant when she had left the table with a bright look at Weil, and the remark that she had to go and spend a penny.
    Now, on her doorstep, he deplored, for Mr. Pines’s sake, the enthusiasm of her offer to house him, but the childless Mabies had two spare bedrooms, and there were not many such in Pittston.
    Mrs. Mabie opened the door, chin forward, hair