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Flannery as confident, behind her poker face she was actually rattled enough to have to think twice about what the instructor was saying. “What kept me a sceptic in college was precisely my Christian faith,” she later confided to the young poet Alfred Corn, going through his own period of doubt as a student at Emory University in 1962. “It always said: wait, don’t bite on this, get a wider picture, continue to read.” By the end of the quarter, though, she had emerged from her shell enough to give the professor a hard time. As she relived one exchange with him, in a letter to the Fitzgeralds, in 1952: “[He] is the one that one day in a class says, ‘The Medieval Church was politheistic.’ I rise and say, ‘The Medieval Church was not politheistic.’ [He] fixes me very coldly, ‘I am speaking,’ says he, ‘as an anthropologist.’”

Helen Matthews Lewis, a student in the class, remembers a few other charged exchanges between professor and pupil. Once O’Connor went up to the blackboard to diagram, in detail, what she saw as the contrast between Aquinas and modernism. “Philosophy class was early in the morning, and most of us would be pretty sleepy and would have missed breakfast,” says Lewis. “We would run across campus, sometimes trying to hide our pajamas under our raincoats, to get to class. Flannery was always there, bright and ready to go, ready to argue with the professor.” As Beiswanger summed up O’Connor’s position: “It was philosophical modernism that had blinded the Western mind.”

What registered most strongly was the certainty that he had before him no ordinary girl: “She knew Aquinas in detail, was amazingly well read in earlier philosophy, and developed into a first rate ‘intellectual’ along with her other accomplishments. . . . It soon became clear to me that she was a ‘born’ writer and that she was going that way.” A classic example of a teacher making a difference, Beiswanger encouraged his A student to apply for graduate school at his alma mater, the University of Iowa. She sent in applications to both Duke University and to the journalism program at Iowa, mulling a possible career in newspaper political cartooning. The professor lobbied his contacts at the school to secure her a scholarship. When offered a journalism scholarship from Iowa, providing full tuition and sixty-five dollars a term, she quickly accepted.

At eleven o’clock on Monday morning, June 11, 1945, the fifty-fourth annual commencement of Georgia State College for Women opened with a procession of graduating seniors, O’Connor among them, accompanied by the well-worn organ strains of the “Grand March” from Aïda. Taking place on a hot Georgia summer’s day, with temperatures expected to rise to the midnineties by afternoon, the procession might well have “plodded stolidly along” to Russell Auditorium, like that of Sally Poker Sash and her graduating class in “A Late Encounter with the Enemy”:

The black procession wound its way up the two blocks and started on the main walk leading to the auditorium. The visitors stood on the grass, picking out their graduates. Men were pushing back their hats and wiping their foreheads and women were lifting their dresses slightly from the shoulders to keep them from sticking to their backs. The graduates in their heavy robes looked as if the last beads of ignorance were being sweated out of them.

Like the commencement speaker in “Late Encounter” who “was through with that war and had gone on to the next one,” Georgia Governor Ellis Arnall assured the 165 GSCW graduates that “the hope for lasting peace lies not in Washington nor on the battlefronts of the world, but in the hands of the 1945 graduates.” All were then “hooded” by Miss Katherine Scott. In the flurried ritual of yearbook autographing, Mary Flannery wrote as her standard entry, simply, “The usual bunk — M. F. O’Connor.”

In its coverage of the graduation, the Colonnade reported that “the realm of further study” had claimed five graduates, including Student Government Association President Betty Boyd at Chapel Hill, and “Mary Flannery O’Connor at Iowa