So, then, Tyler had expected to miss her first of all.  The way she talked.  The way she fussed around him without in the least seeming to fuss.  Her special way of cooking things.  Her laugh which drew laughter in its wake.  The funny way she had of saying things, vitalising commonplaces with the spark of her own electricity.

And now he missed her only as the average boy of twenty-one misses the mother he has been used to all his life.  No more and no less.  Which would indicate that Stella Kamps, in her protean endeavours, had overplayed the parts just a trifle.

He had expected to miss the boys at the bank.  He had expected to miss the Mandolin Club.  The Mandolin Club met, officially, every Thursday and spangled the Texas night with their tinkling.  Five rather dreamy-eyed adolescents slumped in stoop-shouldered comfort over the instruments cradled in their arms, each right leg crossed limply over the left, each great foot that dangled from the bony ankle, keeping rhythmic time to the plunketty-plink-tinketty-plunk.

He had expected to miss the familiar faces on Main Street.  He had even expected to miss the neighbours with whom he and his mother had so rarely mingled.  All the hundred little, intimate, trivial, everyday things that had gone to make up his life back home in Marvin, Texas—­these he had expected to miss.

And he didn’t.

After ten weeks at the Great Central Naval Training Station so near Chicago, Illinois, and so far from Marvin, Texas, there were two things he missed.

He wanted the decent privacy of his small quiet bedroom back home.

He wanted to talk to a girl.

He knew he wanted the first, definitely.  He didn’t know he wanted the second.  The fact that he didn’t know it was Stella Kamps’ fault.  She had kept his boyhood girlless, year and year, by sheer force of her own love for him, and need of him, and by the charm and magnetism that were hers.  She had been deprived of a more legitimate outlet for these emotions.  Concentrated on the boy, they had sufficed for him.  The Marvin girls had long ago given him up as hopeless.  They fell back, baffled, their keenest weapons dulled by the impenetrable armour of his impersonal gaze.

The room?  It hadn’t been much of a room, as rooms go.  Bare, clean, asceptic, with a narrow, hard white bed and a maple dresser whose second drawer always stuck and came out zig-zag when you pulled it; and a swimmy mirror that made one side of your face look sort of lumpy, and higher than the other side.  In one corner a bookshelf.  He had made it himself at manual training.  When he had finished it—­the planing, the staining, the polishing—­Chippendale himself, after he had designed and executed his first gracious, wide-seated, back-fitting chair, could have felt no finer creative glow.  As for the books it held, just to run your eye over them was like watching Tyler Kamps grow up.  Stella Kamps had been a