From the Hamilton Library on the campus of UH, all thought of the Criminal Shelter and my attachments, even loves, here foregone. I'm reading miscellanies of Nancy Mitford, her newspaper columns, letters, etc. Bright Young Thing (born 1904) that she was, couldn't very well help being--and chain-smoking, smart-ass foe of the Rococo (indifferent to Haydn and Mozart, much less Boccherini, Gluck or Viotti)--still, she knew of the value of Mesdames de la Fayette and de la Tour du Pin, and she had instincts, and considerable knowledge of the French people, their history and culture. Her tart summation of the quarrel between Cocteau and Mauriac, with its final devastating epithet "inculture," is better (wittier, having a firmer grasp of the issues) than either of them could have come up with....

So here I am, on the UH campus--on th'Aonian Mount--revelling in the pure Parnassian, plumeria- scented air, so different in glorious summer from odorless, sad winter; thinking: This can, and should be, my home. I think I just will go round to the graduate student advisory center and get advised, maybe registered. And just as I'm thinking these normal, happy, natural thoughts, there slithers in front of me, right across the room in front of the circulation and information desk, one of the sickest and stupidest of the sick, stupid denizens of that very homeless shelter which I have been so exultant at having left far, far benind me: "Mme. Butterfly" we call him on account of his gross, unclean, arachnoid effeminacy, and his habit of fanning himself, like a revenant from the Scopes trial, with a paper fan. What is one so vile, so poisonous, so sub-literate (he speaks, croaks, hisses only in the most debased local creole dialect) doing here in the ivory tower? Cruising the men's rooms, I can only suppose.