Mike's Club never looked so clean before, or so barren either, Vag mused as he fitted, in front of a vintage car driven awkwardly by a man in a striped tie. "The Frappe Bar of New England," Vag read aloud from the booming plate glass pronouncement that garnished the sagging street corner. "What a tag for old Mike to conjure with. He wouldn't know his Club these days. But what would he know in Cambridge?"

Vag moved faster, reminded of his mission by the stream of nine o'clock scholars that was passing him. "Who ever thought I'd see so many balding heads above the upturned collars?" He went on talking to himself, as he always did when he walked in the rain. "Funny how the perspective on this place changes. Once it was overwhelming--so much to be done, so many guys who looked and talked as though they knew it all. Almost enough to make a guy want to throw up his hands." Now he had an idea that he knew why he was here, not that he knew where he was going. He was on his way to audit a nine o'clock class. He remembered when a good program was one that started after eleven o'clock, and rued the day, thinking of what he had missed. Now he was on his way to one of the General Education courses, something labelled Humanities 1a. He shuddered when he thought of those other years when he had wandered around in the catalogue, sometimes looking for something big, sometimes for a skill to be learned. But usually the literature or philosophy courses were too narrow or taught in monotones, and the Gov and Ec was too specialized, or somehow irrelevant to his own thinking. They seemed to have no roots. He had stumbled upon General Education. He liked it. There were roots and there were teachers who seemed anxious to teach. It made him wish he had it to do all over again as he entered the yard to grow in wisdom. I. A. Richards spoke of the "Iliad" and the sources of western culture, communicating with a passion. Beer, the same Sam Beer who was once his Gov 1 section man in the basement of New Lecture Hall, was talking about western thought institutions in Social Sciences 2a. They never had added up before, those lectures.

Vag brushed past the men in the heavy rimmed glasses who were fluttering around the dirty-legged Radcliffe girl on the steps of Emerson. "Buster, things have changed," he said to one of the tweed jackets. The answer was an unseeing eye. "The New England Frappe Bar, men with women and General Education." Vag agreed with himself-- "Things have certainly changed." He elbowed his way through the perfumed corridor to audit a general education.