Free The Small Room by May Sarton

some private woe.”
    â€œHow do you know? Perhaps she is just lazy, or going through a phase.”
    â€œI know because the girl appears in class in a state of alarming self-neglect, dirty, hair hardly brushed; because she keeps her head down throughout the hour, and because it is clear that she spends a great deal of time crying.”
    â€œSo did I when I was her age,” Olive said, unexpectedly. “I suspect that I rather enjoyed it. I got out of it, not because I had a professor who took a personal interest in me, but because I did have (thank God!) a professor who made me take an interest in a subject. It happened to be Greek. Give her psychiatric attention—for I presume what you are saying is that you would be glad to turn this weeper over to someone else and take her back when she combs her hair and stops crying—give her that , and she’ll just wallow in self. ”
    Lucy cast a questioning glance in Carryl Cope’s direction, but it gave her no clue.
    â€œMaybe I’m just not a very good teacher,” Lucy said with her back to the wall. “But she is not at the moment capable of reading The Iliad , let alone getting interested in it.”
    â€œThe translations are inadequate.” Lucy felt baffled by this assault from temperament, originality, and non-reason in equal quantities.
    â€œâ€˜The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,’” Carryl Cope quoted the much-quoted, but Lucy was happy to hear Yeats invoked in this room, which he would have enjoyed, as well as the personality it reflected, learned, curious, wearing a mask of mockery to conceal—what? Lucy liked Carryl Cope; she did not dislike Olive Hunt, but she found her truly eccentric, off-center. She had, Lucy suspected, led a wholly undisciplined and self-indulgent life, though nothing would astonish her more than to be told so. Probably she got up at six and either did physical exercises or spiritual ones, mortified herself in idiosyncratic ways, and thought because of this that she had a disciplined mind and knew what a life like Carryl Cope’s, so much more demanding in every way, was all about.
    Had Carryl’s point of view been colored by this influence? Was this her vulnerability, her Achilles heel, an attachment that provided a Constable over the mantel and these passionate tensions, and what else? How dangerous love can be, Lucy thought, while the discussion continued between the other two. She came back to it to hear Miss Hunt saying, in an apparent total reversal from her position earlier on.
    â€œIs the subject the point? Isn’t it a means to an end? And isn’t the end of teaching to bring people up, to get that sordid Freshman of yours onto her feet and functioning as a human being? So it’s no excuse,” she turned back to Lucy with a fleeting smile, “to say she can’t read The Iliad . It’s all woven together, surely. But you want to split people up, hand over part of your student to a psychiatrist while you stuff her noodle with information. I call that abdicating!”
    â€œOlive, you are being rather hard on Lucy.” Carryl Cope used her given name for the first time and Lucy was pleased. “Of course, there are students who simply do not belong in college. This girl sounds like one of those. Oh dear, do let’s change the subject. I feel quite winded!”
    â€œBut let me just answer!”
    â€œDon’t shoot till you see the whites of her eyes!” Carryl laughed.
    But Lucy felt too badgered and on the defensive to take things lightly. “I think you’re probably right,” she said turning to Olive Hunt. “Of course one tries to reach the whole person, but if I began to see my students outside the conferences, I wouldn’t have time to read their papers or to prepare my classes. Besides,” plunging recklessly into the center of the problem again, “don’t