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The air of the examination room was heavy and smelt of chalk. Through the open windows from the yard drifted the whir of lawnmowers and the fragrance of cut grass. Fanshaw had just finished three hundred words on The Classical Subject in Racine. He found himself listening to the lawnmowers and breathing in the rifts of warm sweetness that came from the mashed grass. It almost made him cry. The spring of Freshman year, the end of Freshman year. The fragrance of years mown down by the whirring, singsong blades. He stared at the printed paper: Comparative Literature 1. Devote one hour to one of the following subjects.... And the girl in the blue dress had plunked herself down under a tree and cried. What a fool I was to walk away like that. "What's that perfume? Mary Garden," she had said, and her grey glance had wriggled into his eyes and his hands had moved softly across the fluffy dress, feeling the whalebone corsets under the blue fluff. No, that's when I helped her back into the canoe. Elise Montmorency, the girl in the blue dress, had plunked herself down under a tree and cried because he hadn't kissed her. But he had kissed her; he had come back and lain on the grass beside her and kissed her till she wriggled in his arms under the blue fluff and the sunshine had lain a hot tingling coverlet over his back.