Debevoise was thirty-four and took no part in adventure. He didn’t care for women and he couldn’t care for men. He lived in a corner second-story room of a rambling boardinghouse. The room had two windows, one of which overlooked the field and the other, the sea. There were no curtains on the windows and he never pulled the shades. He ate breakfast with the elderly owners, lunch every noon at the high school and drove to a hotel in the next town for dinner every night. He was stern and deeply tanned and exceptionally good-looking. As for the teaching, he barely recognized his students as human beings, considering them all mentally bludgeoned by the unremitting landscape. He couldn’t imagine chemistry doing any better or worse by them than anything else.

And the girls felt hopeless, stubborn and distraught, for they had come a long way on just a whisper more than nothing.