| OCR Text |
Show Chapter Fourteen Driving down the highway of the Peninsula, the Professor's thoughts left the students and their s t r i k e and focussed on his sister-intlaw. His wife had been told that she was holding her own, even improving a l i t t l e . The doctor considered the operation, which consisted of cutting out some and rearranging other of her internal organs, a success. S t i l l the atmosphere of death hung over the household. Going there to pick up his wife, who would be waiting with her brother and her two other sisters, was no r e l i e f from the anxieties of the campus. Just the opposite. But the two worries impinged upon each other and affected everything that the Professor had once considered normal. He was, his thoughts told him, a l i t t l e old to be so unprepared, but in the Professor's l i f e there had been no real preparation for death. His two great-frandmothers had died in his infancy, and he could only vaguely yemember them - one who taught him to speak certain stmge Welsh words, the other who simply sat, out of doors in a shax*l, on a wide lawn that must have been a t her Ogden home. He had not even had time to think of them as old before they disappeared from his consciousness. One of his grandfathers had died before he was born; the other, when he was in Germany as a missionary. His two grandmothers had died in t h e i r eighties, their deaths |
