"Founder's sake!" I was moved to exclaim. Max seemed to have joined Croaker in sleep.
"Shucks," Greene scoffed " 'tweren't nothing but a daydream. All a girl's got to do's say boo to me, pass her heart, I turn tail and run! Anyhow, I set there hotter'n a fox and watched 'em get their skirts blowed up, till finally along comes Sally Ann, with some old Enochism-teacher she'd met in the funhouse that used to know her, and he'd helped her find her way when she was lost inside. I figured she'd just as leave not show her drawers to him — especially since he seemed to be carrying on right smart for who he was and all — so I jumped up to tell her about the air-hose; but she was laughing at something or other and didn't notice me till whoosh — up goes her dirndl, and there's her pretty drawers with the yellow roses on! Right then I hear a whistling and a whooping, and a voice hollering out to Miss Sally Ann to come there and see what he had for her, stuff like that. Made my blood boil! I looked round to see who'd come up, 'cause till then there hadn't nobody been left of me where the hollering was, you understand? Weren't even no benches there to set on. What there was was just this tall skinny plate-glass window along the wall, right near the exit, and when I squinched up my eyeballs with my fingers I could see a fellow standing there, bold as brass! First thing struck me, it must be that Peeping Tom she said'd been a-pestering her — seeing he knew her name and was talking so fresh. Anyhow I knew he was the one that was whistling and hollering, 'cause I could see he still had his hand up by his mouth. So I figure, I'll teach him a lesson he won't soon forget, by Jimmy Gumbo, and I pick me a rock up off the ground. Now I took for granted the window was open, it being such a warm night and him a-hollering so plain; all I had in mind to do was snib him one to show him what was what. But time I hauled off to chunk, I saw he'd got a rock his own self and was set to knock my block off with it, so I let fly all my might. Never did find out if I hit him, 'cause we never saw nor heard from him after that. But he sure got me! What happened was, the durn window was shut — whatever it was — and his rock and mine must of busted into it right the same time. His never hit me, but the glass went flying every whichaway, and a little tiny piece of it struck me in the eye."
His fiancée's alarm, he went on to say, soon brought assistance: he was hurried to the Infirmary, where first the glass was removed and later the eyeball, irreparably damaged. Upon reviving from anesthesia he found Miss Sally Ann at his bedside, and they commiserated for the loss of both his eye and their last night to spend together on Great Mall. More to his chagrin, now that making love was out of the question he was splendidly erect, nor did any amount of ironic remark upon this phenomenon at all diminish it. Nay, his pain and the blindfold of bandages notwithstanding, he lusted more powerfully than ever before; her consolatory kisses only inflamed him; he must have her then and there, nurses be flunkèd; she must close and block the door and come at once to bed. Reluctant at first, she was at last brought blushing to it, rather to his surprise: protesting soft but breathing hard she slipped out of her shoes and between his sheets, and the sweet deed was done.
"Well, sir," Greene declared — more as one beginning than concluding a story: "I told her the honest truth then: how it was my first time, and I never had actually swived old O.B.G.'s daughter."
This news, he said (when Max returned to partial slumber after stirring to remark that swive was a fine old verb whose desuetude in all but a few back-campus areas was much to be deplored, as it left the language with no term for service that was not obscene, clinical, legalistic, ironic, euphemistic, or periphrastic), Miss Sally Ann professed not to believe; she'd even scolded him a bit for so exaggerating the importance of what, to her mind, was a mere technicality beside the fact of true and exclusive love that he felt he must deceive her on the point. They married soon after, and directly his wound was healed and his glass eye installed, he immersed himself with equal passion in his work and his newly realized manhood. Greene Timber doubled and tripled its holdings, destroying its competitors, exploiting its workers, depleting the countryside, and diversifying into related areas of manufacture. The Greenes moved from cabin to manorhouse and begot a great number of offspring, whose rearing Mrs. Greene relinquished her profession to supervise; there was no further need for her to work anyhow, and she agreed with her husband that woman's place was in the home. There she gave orders to a staff of domestics, took up the piano and painting on glass, read long novels, and tatted the hems of pillowslips. They regarded their match as ideal and themselves as blissful in it — but in certain moods, now he was initiated, Greene bewailed his lost opportunities with O.B.G.'s flunkèd daughter and perhaps even consorted with her secretly, in or out of prison, always however berating himself the while for polluting, or thinking to pollute, his perfect marriage. And Miss Sally Arm now and then complained of spells of faintness and that her life was after all as empty as some statue's in a Founder's Hall.
Then, sometime in his twenties, for reasons he could not well articulate, Greene's opinion changed profoundly on the question of Answers and Graduation. Some said he was influenced by disillusioned veterans of the First Campus Riot; others, that this disillusionment in turn was but the popular dramatizing of a state of intellectual affairs that dated from the Rematriculation Period and had long prevailed "across the Pond" in the famous seats of West-Campus learning. Still others pointed out, quite correctly, that Greene was a rustic without classical education or much use for the departments of moral science and the fine arts; they were inclined to relate his new attitude to the loss of his eye or of his adolescent vigor, to the belated realization of character deficiencies, or to domestic and business difficulties.
"Which is putting the cart before the goshdarn horse, them last ones," he said. "I figure I invented my Answers my own self, just like Sally Ann and me invented making love, no matter how many'd thought of it before."
Whatever the causes, the effects were unmistakable: they moved from their rural estate to an urban quad; he made his wife a full-time equal partner in his business; they toured distant campuses, learned to smoke cigarettes, drink cocktails, dance to jazz-music, drive fast motorcycles, and practice contraception. Miss Sally Ann now freely admitted enjoying what theretofore she had seemed only to permit: husband and wife put by all inhibition and together tasted every sweet and salty dish in love's cuisine, improvising some, discovering others accidentally, borrowing not a few from the high-spiced cookbooks of ancient Remus and Siddartha, which Greene no longer perused in secret but shared with his wife. Nay, further, emancipated alike from the stuffy prohibitions of old-fashioned lecturers and the economics of harder terms, they went from twin beds to separate vacations to separate residences and friends, and mortgaged all their assets to extend by daring speculation their business interests and finance their costly extracurricular activities.