Free Pamela Dean by Tam Lin (pdf)

on Nick, who had no notion of what to do with her. Robin seemed to be taking much more notice of her than Nick did, but she was oblivious to this. Molly had on a sardonic look, which made Janet wonder how she herself was behaving. Having considered it on their second trip past the Music and Drama Center, the chapel, and the Student Union, she decided that if she stopped giggling quite so much she would make a creditable account of herself. Since Nick reacted to Christina's attempts at conversation largely by making puns at her, this was difficult. Christina obviously thought that Janet was laughing only to be ingratiating.
    When they had carried the last metal frame up the four flights of steps in Ericson and collapsed on the floor, the sky was the color of pewter and the wind was what Janet's family called a wolf wind—it would huff and puff and blow your house down.
    "I'm starving," she said. "Let's go to supper."
    "Taylor's closed," said Robin, mournfully.
    "Good; I don't want to eat in a dungeon with a storm coming on. Let's go to Dunbar. We can look at the lake."
    A vast spattering outside proclaimed the arrival of rain.
    "Eliot," said Molly, firmly. "We can take the tunnel."
    They went, not very quickly, down five flights of steps and into the basement of Ericson, past the recalcitrant soda machines and the steel racks, painted with the Civil Defense symbol and filled with empty barrels marked, "Water." "Dehydrated water,"
    Janet's mother always remarked. "Just add water." Janet's father said the remark lacked symmetry, but the children always laughed.
    They passed the door of the laundry room, whence came a noise like somebody taking apart a bunk bed with a hockey stick underwater; went down a short flight of steps, and entered the system of steam tunnels that underlay the whole east side of campus. On the bright red covering of the steam pipe at eye level, somebody had spray-painted in white, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."
    It always irritated Janet. "All hope abandon," she muttered.
    "Why is it always the people who use paint that get their quotations wrong?" said Nick Tooley, bounding up on her right. "Last year somebody wrote out the whole of
    'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came' in Holmes Tunnel in water-soluble marker ink, not a mistake in it, down to the very commas—and when a pipe burst and flooded the tunnel it was all washed out."
    "I thought you were a freshman," said Janet.
    "My brother attended Blackstock too."
    "Does he make puns?" said Christina, edging up on Nick's other side.
    "No," said Nick gravely. "He goes in for more practical jokes."
    Christina looked sidelong at him and said nothing. They rounded a corner and walked past the entrance to Holmes Tunnel, which was much newer and glared with fluorescent light. They passed the entrance to Forbes Tunnel on their left. Ahead on the same side was a very old block of Greek that had puzzled Janet for years. "Robin,"
    she said, "what's this?"
    Robin squinted at the faded blue letters, which looked as if they had been put on with a fine paintbrush. "First ten lines of The Iliad, " he said. "That's been there long and long. Somebody ought to touch it up."
    "What does it say?" asked Christina. "Translate it for us."
    "No, read it first," said Janet.
    Robin cleared his throat, opened his eyes wide upon the peeling wall of the tunnel, and rolled out of his tidy beard huge assonant syllables in a rocky rhythm, punctuated with thumps where he came down hard on two s
    yllables in a row. Janet,
    having seen that his expression was going to remain blank, looked at Molly. He's got her, she thought; I'm enchanted by Eliot, and Molly's done in by Homer. Or maybe just by that voice. I wonder what would get to Christina. Christina was looking bored.
    Robin finished, and after a small silence Nick began to applaud. "Shall I change my major?" he said.
    "What does it mean?" said Christina.
    Nick said, "'Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring Of woes