Chapter 12 second quarter

He went back to the college bachelor's dormitory for a while, but the road driller came back with him, and there were other annoying noises.He still rents the second-floor, pink-walled bedroom with white borders in the Clements' home, his first real favorite home after living in it for more than a year.By now he had eradicated all remaining traces of the previous occupants; he was probably the only one who thought so, for he hadn't noticed, and probably never would, that there was a funny face scribbled on the wall above the head of the bed Well, there are some half-erased height bars on the side of the door, penciled in from a four-foot height in 1940.

Pnin had been in charge of the household for over a week, as Joan Clements had flown to a western state to see her married daughter; two days later, Professor Clements had just begun teaching the spring term In my philosophy class, I suddenly received an urgent telegram and flew to the west. Our friend ate breakfast leisurely, mainly the cup of milk that he could not get tired of, and was ready to walk to the campus as usual at 9:30. It warmed my heart that he put on his overcoat like a Russian intellectual: his head poked forward, his typical bald head, that big Duchess of Wonderland chin pressed tightly against the erected chin. The top of the green scarf held it against his chest, and then he gave a jerk of his shoulders to get both arms into the armholes of the coat; another jerk and the coat was on.

He picked up his portfel', checked its contents, and walked out the door. He was only a newspaper throw away from the porch when he remembered the college library urging him to return a book quickly so that another reader could use it.He struggled for a moment; he still needed the volume; but the good Pnin sympathized with the clamorous and urgent demands of the other (unnamed) scholar, and was obliged to return for the thick and heavy volume: In 1940, Mosley-Leningrad published the eighteenth volume of the "Sovetskiy Zolotoy Fond Literaturi" (Sovetskiy Zolotoy Fond Literaturi), which mainly studied Tolstoy's papers.