The thunder sounded a day after lightning had struck her down as she was crossing a field on her way home. Her death had aroused the condescendant sympathy she had always received, but her unsuspected celebrity incited a competition between mourners even more anxious to show how close a friend they had been than how much they regretted her death. Obviously they regretted her, nonetheless, as their twisted mouths and distraught eyes revealed, indeed some managed to shed a few tears. They read her poems with a wail that wouldn't have pleased the student who had, at least in my courses, distinguished herself by her suspicion of hysteria and author worship. Although she had taught our children in preschool and we had invited her to our house, we heard of the reading only by chance while listening to WZFM. When we arrived at the auditorium, the presence of Harry Sinkovitch and Jerry Mumpet among the readers startled us. Hadn't they led the pack in the French Department howling for a terminal MA? Jamma, who seldom said anything against anybody, had confided in us that their courses had never tempted her despite the crowds who took them. Between poems, however, Sinkovitch and Mumpet hinted at their friendship with the poetess, along with Priss Chariztky, a young Englishman named Tom and a graduate student named Delly, all three from the English Department. At the middle of the table behind which they sat, presided Elston Howard, the chairman of that department, who looked like a stone soldier and spoke with a hollow voice. So brazenly did the pronunciation of the readers distort the poetry they were reading that we soon left.

Heading for our Volvo, we heard steps and heavy breathing behind us. "I didn't see you until you got up to leave," said Cary O'Sullivan, a distinguished scholar and distinguished professor of English. The students liked him so much that they would rather have a bad grade from him than a good one from another professor. The faculty liked him too, except for Elston and the youthful majority of the department who supported him. Cary had committed the sin of publishing extensively in the field of "rightnow" American poetry, as he called it, without paying any attention to the critical doctrines they advocated. Thus they had decided to keep him and the other fuddy-duddies in the department from contaminating the graduate students. Administrators admired the skill with which Elston had maneuvered Cary and his friends into the offices at the west end of the corridor on the fifth floor of Murkington Hall, where graduate students and young faculty couldn't visit them without detection. People were calling the enclave West Berlin and the chairman of the department, EH. Hearing of these 

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nicknames by way of Prickly Hembrake's lips and Priss Charitzky's ear, Elston blamed them on Cary and decided to punish him at the first opportunity.

Cary had never heard of Jamma before he received the flyer announcing the reading, so we invited him for a drink. When we told him that she had published her poetry on the Internet, he admitted that he hadn't gotten around to that yet. Murma and I had been using the internet, we told him, but we hadn't heard anything about her poetry either. I had made her acquaintance years ago when she was an undergraduate and took courses from me. I had noticed sparks of intelligence and fervor, more often in my office than in class and more often in term papers than on tests. After a major in French, she entered our graduate program and took two more courses from me including my Voltaire seminar. Alone and therefore in vain, I pleaded with the rest of the departmental faculty to let her pursue a PhD, but friends and enemies alike objected that the grades on her MA exam and her coursework averaged below the level at which we made exceptions. Though inclined to sympathize with her, Millie Barnes joined others in complaining that she seldom participated in class discussions and, when asked a question, took too much time before resorting to a desperate answer that made Millie wonder whether she had understood it. A modest student with deliberate intelligence, I replied, often achieved profounder thought than a conceited ass with glib facility. While friends like George Mayflower hesitated between their convictions and their respect for mine, Sinkovitch thundered against weak students who tried to slip through the program by avoiding tough courses, while Mumpet jerked his head up and down, hissing "yesss! yesss!..."

Cary: "Do Mumpet and Sinkovitch teach tough courses?"

Despite the excess and distortion of the reading, a few phrases from Jamma's poetry haunted Murma and me. The readers had mentioned an internet address: sh.com? That turned out to be Shanghai, so I varied the spellings and extensions until I reached shshsh, an austere home page with the phrase "even sound needs silence" at the top. "Poetry by Cicada" followed, then links to three collections: Friends, Lovers and Clouds. As we browsed ___________________________________________________________ 

through them, we found much that reminded us of Jamma while revealing how little we knew her. We found nothing in Friends that echoed our phrases, but Lovers began to satisfy our curiosity right from the start. Sinkovitch had rolled his eyes across the ceiling when he recited "the canopy of my intertwining limbs" which we discovered in a poem entitled "The Me Tree." Since the phrase appeared in Lovers, we guessed that he had interpreted it as an expression of self-love and hence homosexual love, which seemed legitimate to us. Yet the many allusions to the tree's contact with its environment persuaded us that the poetess had gone much further in identifying its lovers. She described the wind caressing or slapping its leaves, its roots slipping or driving into the soil, vines slithering up its trunk and clinging to its bark by their barbs, squirrels embracing and clawing its branches, birds making their own love and plucking twigs to build their nests. These metaphors could scarcely have escaped Sinkovitch, but we wondered whether he had also noticed the subtle parallels between them and the conception of personal identity indicated by the title. "Who am I?" the poetess was asking. "I am the lover and the beloved of every living thing that my senses perceive, and yet love is a struggle between pleasure and pain."

We found another of our phrases further on in a poem entitled "My Might Have Beens." Mumpet had recited "The embracing power of my members" with a relish that reminded us of his urge to add the freedom of sex to the Bill of Rights. He had stressed every word in the poem that he could interpret as supporting an amendment to this effect. Yet he had ignored the conflation of the mistress embracing her lover with the mother embracing her children. The poetess was addressing the descendents that she might have had as well as the men who could have engendered them. She was lavishing her passion on an entire family who couldn't hear because they had no ears. A survivor might have used the same language even though he had enjoyed the company of those he regretted. "My Might Have Beens" complemented "The Me Tree" by explaining how a young woman endowed with an extraordinary capacity for love had resorted to her sensual experience for lack of the superficial traits that appeal to the reproductive instinct in the opposite sex. Curiously, therefore, Sinkovitch and Mumpet had stumbled over the two poems in Lovers that enlightened us the most about her and yet without realizing their biographical importance. 

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When we finished Lovers, we hesitated between Clouds and the clock, which reminded us that we had a busy day tommorrow. We tried to put our curiosity to sleep, but the discovery of a Jamma we had never suspected kept waking us up. No sooner did I fall asleep than Murma said: "I wonder why she..." and we wondered why. Then she fell asleep and I succumbed to a similar temptation: "I think she..." and we thought it out loud. Then it was her turn: "You remember when..." and we remembered when. On and on it went and the red numbers in the alarm clock window kept warning us that we were wasting more and more of tommorrow before it had even begun. How could we put an end to this folly? The tactics to which we had resorted in earlier years would do more harm than good, so we tossed and turned... We had exhausted the subject, or so we thought, before the body finally numbed the mind for its own good.

When you first saw Jamma, you couldn't help noticing her "weight problem," a euphemism I wouldn't have resorted to if her struggle hadn't been heroic. She bulged and sagged in all the worst places and increasingly as the years went by, despite relentless dieting and exersize. The dieting, which threatened her mental and physical health, only seemed to make the bulges sag, while the exersize, which exhausted her, hardened them into useless ugly muscle. On the occasions when I saw her eat, she hardly ate anything and struggled to keep her eyes away from the food and the other diners. If her neighbors tried to make conversation, she gave them little encouragement. Waiting for an answer to a friendly question embarrassed them as much as the asking had embarrassed her. She seldom saw much to smile at and even less to laugh at, but, even when she did, her face, which bulged and sagged as much as the rest of her, didn't easily wreath into the expression that distinguishes us from the other animals. Her lips curved naturally downward, her eyes had no sparkle and her brows peaked with anxiety if not suspicion. I happened to drive by as she was jogging one day. Everything was bouncing and swinging while her thighs rubbed against each other and her feet flopped on the ground. Her determination was driving her at a pace that resembled a stumbling walk. The desperation in her face persuaded me to drive on as if I hadn't recognized her. Prickly Hembrake had started a rumor: "Miss Hipp raises the water level a quarter of an inch when she plops into the pool at six in the morning." A frown from Dean Furlock, who slipped into the next lane at the same time, silenced the pipsqueak professor of Comp Lit for an entire week. 

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Jamma's readers, who had known her best, had known her only by the electronic communication of her poetry and thus without the distraction of her body. Fortunately, she hadn't lived to witness the travesty of her spirit perpetrated on the pretext of having known her in the flesh. Our consternation had scarcely subsided when I received a call from a voice my age, who told me that he was Jacob Skullthorp:

"You were Jamma's favorite professor."

A woman's voice added something.

Our conversation reminded me of Jamma's love for "my Dad," words she had uttered with fervor, and I realized that I was talking with a man who would be my friend for the rest of our lives. He and Muriel were anxious to receive Murma and me in Jamma's appartment, where they faced more than the usual problems with the succession of an independent, unmarried daughter. We had never entered 327 Tree Shadow Mews nor, to our surprize, had her parents, whom she had discouraged from coming to see her. She had always insisted that East Dalrymple, a fishing village near the mouth of the Lipisquoit, was heaven compared to Concordia. A few days in our town had disabused her parents, for they found it different from theirs but just as pleasant and they realized why Jamma had never moved back. "She brought books with her for vacations," explained Muriel, a gaunt woman with a squeaky voice. Jacob was tall, thin, stoop-shouldered: "She forgot our problems when she came back here." Neither Murma nor I mentioned the rusty white van we had seen outside with "Lipisquoit Repair" in big black letters on the sides and underneath in smaller letters: "Mechanical, Electric, Electronic," and further underneath in still smaller letters: "Don't throw it away, let us repair it, it will work like new." We would learn that Jake took too much pride in keeping this promise to make enough money for trips to Concordia. Only new things make a lot of money.

Jamma's apartment revealed more about her than we had ever guessed. Loaded with books, shelves up to the ceiling lined the walls in the living-dining space and the two bedrooms, the larger of which was her study. She had even crammed narrower ones into the bathroom and kitchen for overflow. Behind her desk, we found a half-empty one reserved for her 

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most recent purchases and the books she was borrowing from the university and town libraries. An antique IBM PC sat on her desk along with a telephone installed by Zenia Bell before the breakup of AT&T. Two metal filing cabinets stood beside the desk with several boxes of 5¼" diskettes stacked on top of them. Suddenly Murma looked down at her ankle, which a gray cat was caressing with its emerald eyes turned up at her as if to see if she appreciated it.

Jake: "That's Jamma's cat."

Muriel: "We don't know how to say its name."

"He's a nice cat," purred Jake, which Ombre would confirm later by meowing at the balcony door.

"Ombre likes her because she's Jamma's friend," explained Jake smiling.

Muriel didn't smile, but she nodded her approval. 

"I bet his tail was twitching," I remarked.

Muriel: "Jamma took that picture before she left for her freshman year."

Jake: "I gave her an old Zeiss Ikon I had repaired. What a wonderful lens!"

"Happy times!" exclaimed Jake with a catch in his throat.

Muriel had tears in her eyes.

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Muriel saw the look in Murma's eyes: "All I had to do was dust and run the vacuum cleaner."

Jake: "The radio and record-player work as well as they did when I gave them to her."

There were a 33 1/3 rpm turntable and two big speakers. Three bottom shelves held a few hundred records of classical music in which troubled or tourmented minors outnumbered triumphant or serene majors. Our sampling of the music encouraged us to look at the library, over which we had been procrastinating. Second-hand books predominated, but new paperbacks occupied most of the remaining space, while a shiny new cover caught the eye here and there. Two bookcases contained volumes of poetry in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin and, to our astonishment, Arabic. In another bookcase, a collection of seventeenth and eighteenth-century philosophers, including critical studies, revealed that Jamma had continued to study them after my courses, which had given her only a smattering of them. Moving from surprise to surprise, we discovered a bookcase devoted to experimental science with, among other fields, some difficult studies in geology, astronomy and physics, including Einstein's papers on relativity. We might have expected books on dieting, but we also found research on metabolism and obesity as well as clinical psychology and the anatomy of the brain all in the same bookcase. Jamma had taken a persistent interest in anthropology and particularly the origins of our species, although she often skipped pages loaded with analytical details. Several ornithological treatises overshadowed a few bird-watching manuals, such as Peterson's Field Guide, which was falling apart. A dozen manuals, many of them gifts from her father, taught the skills needed for upkeep and improvement of property like hers, from repairing a leaky toilet to suspending a bird feeder from the sill of the kitchen window, beside which she had put a small table.

Jake: "I couldn't find anything to fix."

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and theology except a Jersualem Bible and anthologies of Augustine in Latin and Luther in German. Among the meager examples of current trends, such as critical theory, Freudian and Marxist criticism, feminism, "queer theory," muticulturalism, etc., only one volume had been entirely read. Anger, sarcasm and scorn blackened the margins of La Grammatologie by Derrida, scolded for wasting Jamma's time and reminded that she was only plowing through his nihilistic conundrums so nobody could accuse her of shooting from the hip. This comment gave Murma and me a laughing fit that embarrassed all four of us, so I explained that Jamma had exposed a charlatan.

There were few plays, novels, biographies, histories and recently published books, but a glance at Jamma's library receipts, which she had filed in shoe boxes, showed that she had been borrowing such works from the local collections ever since her sophomore year. When struck by lightning, she had been returning from the university library with an armful of books about the Tadzhiks after taking another armful on the steam locomotive back to the city library. In-between, she had spent a few hours in the Mayview Rare Book and Manuscript Library reading the recently acquired manuscripts of Betina Rutherford, who had attacked slavery so violently that family and friends persuaded an editor to keep asking her for them as if he wished to publish them. Instead of destroying them as they had requested, however, he kept them in an attic waiting for a trend that would ensure extraordinary sales. Jamma's notes, which expressed her enthusiasm over Rutherford's courage and her outrage over the conspiracy that had betrayed her, fascinated the four of us.
 

Jake: "This may be the first time anybody but Jamma sat at this table."

Muriel: "I wonder if she ever let anybody else in the apartment."

Me: "Maybe she was expecting us."

Muriel: "What should we do with her things?"

Jake: "We would have disposed of them in the usual way..."

Jake: "There were lots of calls when we first got here." 

Muriel: "None of them were on Jamma's list."

Jake: "Professor Mumpet called twice: do you know him?"

Me: "I'm afraid we do. What did he want?"

Jake: "Well, he tried to convince me that he had been a friend of Jamma's."

Muriel: "She had never mentioned him. The only professor she mentioned was you."

Jake: "No. He offered his condoleances. I thought he was laying it on a little thick. Then he told me about his esteem for Jamma as a student."

Murma: "Maybe you should ask Muriel and Jake not to repeat that."

Me: "Sure, it's supposed to be confidential, but Mumpet thinks the rule only applies to other people."

Muriel: "Jake didn't trust him anyway. He can come to the funeral if he likes."

Jake: "But he's not going to make any speeches. As for Jamma's library and other things..."

Muriel: "Jake told him that we hadn't decided."

Jake: "I wanted to tell him we didn't need any advice. That wouldn't have been true: we need your advice."

Jake: "I like that idea."

Muriel: "So do I."

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to neglect and, if it doesn't buy the property soon, other universities, libraries and foundations may well compete for it."

Murma: "Maybe that would be in Muriel and Jake's interest."

Jake: "There would be risks."

Muriel: "Jamma wouldn't have liked it."

Murma: "Let Wilma call Softack."

Jake: "That would be kind of you."

Muriel: "It would be the best thing we could do for Jamma."

Wilma wanted to see me right away and, as soon as I arrived, she took me upstairs where Softack was waiting. They mentioned the calls and messages they had been receiving about Jamma. When I made my proposal, they listened with more than polite interest.

"As usual," said Softack, "the only problem is finding the money."

Wilma: "What a wonderful opportunity to make amends for terminating an MA whose talent we had overlooked!"

"Well," I objected, scratching my head.

"Since I will retire in a few years, let me brag about my opposition to this blunder, although I hardly realized that I was defending a famous poetess."

"Were you the only one?"

"Yes, I was."

"If one or both agreed, you could apply for a matching grant from the Filippi Foundation."

I shrugged: "The Jamma Skullthorp Library and Museum?" 

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"Sounds good to me."

"Me too, and I like the idea of leaving it where it is. Every time I try to assign empty space, someone protests that he has authorization to use it for something else."

"How about zoning?"

"I will talk to Bessie [the mayor]. We aren't going to sell anything, but the Republicans don't like any expansion by the university."

"Chicken feed compared to a DNA laboratory."

"The rent on a two-bedroom apartment in Tree Shadow Mews must be a few hundred a month. The rare book library, the music library, Buildings and Grounds could send people to evaluate the contents. There aren't any antiques as far as I can see, but nearly everything is in good condition. She kept it that way."

"Ha! Ha! Ha!"

"Jamma would have changed your mind."

Wilma had Softack's permission to offer the university chapel free of charge for Jamma's funeral. Although Jake and Muriel didn't attend their church in Dalrymple regularly, the minister had alerted a colleague in Mapleton who drove up to Concordia to conduct the service. For fear of more rhetoric like that of the reading, the Skullthorps let it be known that Jamma would never have wanted a eulogy. Whitefield Chapel was really a full-sized church and all of the pews were full fifteen minutes before two o'clock when the service was scheduled to begin, yet students, faculty, administrators and townspeople continued to arrive. Wilma sent Gretchkow to have loudspeakers set up outside, while she asked the minister to delay the service until they were ready. It was 2:12 when some feedback, which we could hear inside the chapel, was finally overcome and the service began. Broadcast by WZTV and WZFM, it conformed with the simplicity and sobriety that the Skullthorps had requested. The ZU choir and orchestra performed Bach's "Christ Lag in Todesbunden" which we knew Jamma had loved. The only detail that she would have disliked was the ____________________________________________________________ 

pretty appearance the undertaker had somehow managed to give the body from which she had departed. Nobody bothered to count, but as many as two thousand mourners may have filed pass the open bier. Sheila Wilcox, whose father, a ZU president, had left her two plots in the old university graveyard, had insisted that Jamma be buried in the one reserved for the husband she had never married. As the grand old lady of ZU walked to the grave banging her cane on the flagstones, the crowd parted ahead of her like the waters of the Red Sea. Her arrival went according to plan, but not her recitation of a poem from Jamma's Clouds, which she had discovered three years ago and learned by heart for the occasion. She recited it in a booming voice that made many of us regret that she hadn't done the reading all by herself. The glance I exchanged with Murma confirmed that we could put Clouds off no longer.

That evening, we returned to shshh, I clicked on Clouds and paged down 'My Volatile Self." Sheila's contralto echoed in our ears as we read:

"I wallow in the sky,

Caressed, pushed and pounded

By the capricious winds;

My ever creative,

Mobile plasticity

Moves, expands and contracts,

Reshapes and resizes,

Tirelessly, serenely,

Breathing hot and cold air,

Absorbing the moisture

And building electric

Muscles, until, swelling

And writhing, my white mass

Blackens and, condensing,

Water pours through the air,

Blazing paths of moisture

For the jagged flashes 

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That destroy my victims."

This poem kept us up late too. Sheila had chosen an appropriate one to recite at Jamma's funeral, despite the irony of victims struck by lightning. Clearly the poetess had yearned for an existence free of biological constraints, an amoral liberty and a continuous creativity. Instead of assigning human sentiments to nature, she wanted to escape from them and take refuge in nature. Theology didn't color her poetry, but rather meteorology.

The Skullthorps returned to East Dalrymple with a check for $25 000 and a contract for 10% of the proceeds from the sale of Jamma's poetic works by the ZU Press. I had advised them against yielding exclusive rights to any institution or publisher for less than $50 000 and 15%, thus provoking the outrage of the university and especially Marvin Spratly, the publisher of the ZU Press. The Skullthorps could easily obtain both figures, I assured them, if they organized a competition. I refrained from warning them about Spratly preaching academic ideals and practicing subsidized commercialism. None of the fields in which his press specialized had much to do with contemporary poetry, although he anticipated the objection by touting his paperback series of lake country romantics. Opposed as usual by nearly everybody, including Wilma, I asked the Skullthorps if they would mind if I asked other universities and presses whether they might be interested. A half hour later, Jake called back and said that he and Muriel had decided against it because they felt that Jamma wouldn't have liked it. They were right about that, of course, but I didn't trust Marvin and the idea of a university exploiting the poetry of a student whose talent it had failed to recognize put me in such a bad humor that it took Murma a few days to sooth it away.

Only after the Skullthorps had left did I learn that Jake had asked Wilma to let me edit Jamma's poetry and supervise the library and museum. I was working on several projects that would have kept me busy for a year or two, so I had suggested that three promising young people, a scholar, a librarian and an administrator, be given what I considered three separate jobs. My appointment angered old enemies and made new ones, especially in 

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English. Cary warned me that a delegation from his department would approach me with suggestions and proposals I wouldn't like. He had heard of it only through hearsay. Led by Priss Charitzky, it included Tom Sprinkle and Delly Cooper, all three of whom had participated in the reading. Their attempt to dress for the occasion implied the conviction that I was a fuddy-duddy. Priss was wearing a dress with large copper and bronze leaves fluttering down over it, although we were in spring. Now in her low forties, she looked her age and yet much as she had ten years earlier, a look that I would describe as shriveled like an apple trying not to rot. A graduate student, Delly wore a low-cut dress with a mini-skirt the same color as Ombre which exposed her fat upper and lower parts. Since her high-heel shoes bulged along the sides, I wondered whether she had borrowed them from a friend with bigger feet. She kept tossing her chemical blond hair away from her shoulders which it apparently itched. An assistant professor, Tom had inherited a navy blue pinstripe, tailored by Burton's, from a broader-shouldered father. Mermaids splashing among the lillies in an algae pond decorated his wide tie. He had given his brown wingtips a shine, but the polish had stained one of his white socks.

If I had told them that the Screen Guild was in Room 753 (Goldstein's office), they wouldn't have understood the joke. When I first began to teach at ZU, I dressed carefully, wearing dark suits from Brooks, where Murma and I hesitated and deliberated over the color, the cut, the size and especially the alterations. The salesmen (all men in those days) must have thought we were fussy for our age and budget, but they had the wisdom and patience of their establishment. I wore nothing but white shirts, which Murma laundered and ironed as if she were going to wear them herself. It took us two half-hour visits to Hermès to buy a few ties, which blended perfectly with my other colors. My shoes and accessories received similar attention despite the burden on our budget. Yet I soon perceived that our efforts had achieved little more than association with administrators like Gretchkow and professors like Goldstein. My appearance attracted attention without exersizing any influence, so we went downstairs, floor by floor, from Brooks to L. L. Bean. Sport coats and slacks replaced the suits, turtleneck pullovers replaced the shirts while the ties hung idly on the rack, then sweaters replaced sport coats and the colors faded to brown and gray. Every flight down the stairs shifted more attention away from how I looked to what I said, so Muma packed my Brooks best away as carefully as if they 

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had historic value and reproduced them with an odor of mothballs when an occasion, such as our children's marriages, justified them. 

Trained to intone authority, my visitors' voices dignified the nonsense they expected me to believe. They spared no diplomacy insinuating that their department had exclusive competence in the study of poetry in English. While acknowledging my responsibility for the museum, the library and the edition of Skullthorp's poetry, they suggested that professors and graduate students in English could provide all the expertise I needed for all three projects. My smile may have revealed more of my skepticism than it hid: "Who do you have in mind?" The two younger people were embarrassed, but Priss explained that Tom specialized in twentieth century poetry and that Delly was preparing a dissertation directed by him. Priss herself, she reminded me, had dedicated herself to the women romantics. Having asked Tom about his research, I learned that he had written his dissertation and submitted an article on T. S. Eliot. "Anything else?" I asked. He was contemplating an anthology of Eliot and his contemporaries. "Then, nobody more recent, nobody American?" My curiosity inspired two minutes of parallels between Eliot and Skullthorp that reminded me of a wisp of smoke tugged and twisted by competing puffs of wind. Once he had finished, I gazed at him trying to remember anything I had read in Jamma's poetry that corresponded to his allusions. This treatment embarrassed him and annoyed Priss, so it must have enraged EH when they reported it to him. Of the remaining victims, I decided to spare the easy one and give the tough one a good spanking: 

"You didn't mention Cary O'Sullivan."

Delly stopped tossing her hair.

Priss: "Oh Cary is busy with other things."

"Nothing particularly about women."

Shrug: "Mother Hubbards!"

"Conventional and subservient stuff that reassures uncritical readers."

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subservience in her poetry. I don't remember any disdain for uncritical readers."

"You haven't even done any research on French poetry in the eighteenth century."

"Your edition of Skullthorp's poetry will lack the most advanced scientific methodology. That will make it hard to sell: I wonder whether Marvin will accept the manuscript."

"You are introducing partisan rhetoric in an issue that interests a broad spectrum of the ZU community. Shame on you! Shame on you!"

"You must be out of your mind!"

"I can't think of anything more irrelevant."

"So you are going to tell me how many she took in French: she was a French major, she did her MA in French. Did she write her poetry in French?"

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"I suppose you told them a pack of lies so you could grab her succession for yourself."

"Are you going to tell me what I can say?"

Hardly did Priss leave this remark unanswered, but I can't remember what she said, preoccupied as I was with dusting the table after they had left and they left promptly. I knew Murma would ask whether I had removed the dandruff. She guessed nearly everything that had happened almost as soon as I began to tell the story and listened only to refute any optimism she detected in my remarks. My age, sex, scholarly reputation and hostility to the trends Priss advocated as well as the presence of a younger colleague and a graduate student had certainly aggravated the humiliation I had inflicted on her. Resentment would inspire an account of our quarrel that confirmed EH's worst suspicions and the disappointed witnesses would confirm every accusation. My intention of inviting Cary to collaborate with me would breach the wall EH was trying to build around West Berlin. Since I had refused to negotiate with his emissaries, he would try to force me to make the concessions I had rejected. No sooner had Cary agreed to supervise the edition of Jamma's poetry than EH persuaded Softack to offer him a place in a delegation of ZU professors he was sending on a tour of Chinese universities during the summer. Cary had always wanted to see China, so we drew up a preliminary plan that would accommodate his month-long absence: Murma and I would survey the material stored on computer disks and in the file cabinets. Solomon Grosser from the rare book library, where another quarrel had weakened EH's influence, would inventory Jamma's library, which he had already appraised for the university. Emily Chan, a professor at the University of Michigan who had written her dissertation for Cary, would assemble and assess all extant versions of Jamma's poems, some of which Murma and I expected to find on disk or paper. Edie Prak, the music librarian who had evaluated Jamma's record collection, would inventory it and compile an index of references to music in her poetry and other writings. We planned to hire three young people to help with these tasks and provide clerical support. 

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We wanted to initiate this preliminary stage of the project before Cary left for China. With Softack's approval, Wilma had promised us the funding we needed to pay the helpers and reimburse Emily for her travel and residence expenses. It took the six of us a week to draw up a proposal, which Cary and I submitted to Abe Yearly, the Dean of Research Support. Since the president had endorsed the project, Abe told us, he would review our proposal at once and give us a call by the end of the week. He put one of his big hands on each of our shoulders as he followed us out of his office: "There shouldn't be any problems: you guys have been around." Precisely because we guys had been around, his reassurance worried us. He took pride in being everybody's friend and the greater the friend's influence, the greater his pride. He owed his deanship to a desire to please everybody and a skill in maneuvering opposing parties into a compromise more convenient than useful. Leaving Laniel Hall, Cary and I turned down the sidewalk and, without any particular intention, stopped at a statue that students and faculty loved to ridicule. I leaned on the girl's shoulder and Cary, on the boy's arm. The couple were holding hands and running over grass with grins on their faces. The wind swept her hair back from her cheeks and pushed her skirt against her thighs, raising it enough to show the lace fringe of her petticoat. He had a crew cut and his muscles bulged through his polo shirt and slacks. The need for a successful alumnus had moved the recently founded ZU School of Fine Arts to commission a work by Thaddeus Crandal in 1954 and his "Co-Ed Couple" had enhanced his reputation as the Norman Rockwell of sculpture. A tall girl with a complicated camera appeared and asked whether we would mind if she took our picture. Cary and I looked at each other: no, we wouldn't mind, so she took two to make sure: "Thank you. You will be on the front page of the Advocate tommorrow."

"Did you just happen to be walking by with your camera?"

Cary and I turned and saw that we were standing thirty yards in front of the window faced by Wilma when she sat at her desk.

Cary and I looked at each other and laughed: "There's Mutt," I said, pointing at him." 

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He pointed at me: "There's Jeff."

Wilma's pranks informed her victims that they were in favor, but it was our first time. Frau Klingelstedt, who took pride in keeping people out of the dean's office, ushered us in immediately. Pouring the coffee already, Wilma was smiling the smile that rounded the edges of her worst enemies: "You were lucky I didn't tell them you were discussing Lovers."

Me: "They will think of it themselves."

Cary: "Did we have a silly smile on our faces?"

"Uh oh!"

"We just submitted our budget to Abe."

Cary whistled.

"What is this? The FBI?"

"EH will get to him before then."

"How come everybody is calling us 'guys'?"

"Do we look like students?"

Cary and I laughed.

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"Bravo! But he will tell you that West Berlin opposed grants for this purpose on the grounds that few if any graduate students can do research of interest to scholars."

"I agree."

"Please do that. But it won't stop him from telling Priss to tell Prickly to tell Abe that the English Department has the right to review the budget of a project involving English studies."

"And Abe will indulge his passion for shuttle diplomacy."

Five was already a crowd in Jamma's apartment and, when Emily joined us, we were turning sideways to pass each other in doorways and the hall. Although Cary made a tight squeeze, he enjoyed our contortions, guiding us by words and waves like an Italian truck driver when a village pinched the road. From Cary in his late sixties to Edie in her mid-twenties, we had a joyful time working together. Edie, who looked like a string bean, got Cary's permission to snap his suspenders -- which were red that day -- just as her grandad had let her do. Not only did Ombre caress all the ladies' calves, but he also played tricks on us, such as jerking the cord when somebody had the phone to his ear, lying down on the paper somebody was reading, parading back and forth across the table over which we were talking. Holding some slides up to the light, Murma felt something tickling her nose: Ombre's tail. Emily sat on the edge of her chair and Ombre would jump up behind her, reach around her waist and paw at the things she kept on her lap. Nothing small was safe near the edge of a table, counter or shelf. When Solomon took some books down from a shelf, Ombre would leap into the space and look down on us, his head tilted and the tip of his tail twitching. Kit and Handy, a young couple with a motorcycle who lived downstairs, were taking care of him when we weren't there. Kit had a round face and wore her hair in a long pigtail down her back, except when she 

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pulled it around front. We wondered whether Handy had ever had a haircut or trimmed his beard. Ruddy cheeks and little blue eyes. Both had an inexhaustible supply of good humor. Jamma had been such a good neighbor that they didn't mind the wierd music she was playing.

We had agreed to let Murma concentrate on Jamma's e-mail, which would keep her busy. For fourteen years, the poetess had been sending and receiving messages, both of which she had stored on disk. She answered all of them that came from readers and, as more and more wrote her, the correspondence grew at an increasing rate. Murma had found 1734 condoleances in her online buffer after Jake asked Concord, Jamma's internet service provider, to let us have access to it. Addressed to her survivors, whoever they may be, these messages ranged from traditional formulas of sympathy and regret to elaborate compositions, many of them in verse; from scribblings in awkward English, due to a poor education or a foreign background, to elegant or even fastidious letters. Despite the variety, nearly all had one thing in common: sincerity. They knew nothing of Cicada except the language she used and they had learned her identity with Jamma Skullthorp only when they heard of her death. Who had discovered this identity? Nobody seemed to know. One day, the local press mentioned the death of a young woman struck by lightning; the next, the national press was mourning the loss of America's most famous internet poetess. As usual, there were rumors purporting to explain how the news orginated: 1. Jamma had a secret lover in Concordia who knew she was Cicada and he made an anonymous telephone call to a reporter. Yet no reporter acknowledged having received such a call. 2. Cicada had addressed a poem to one of her admirers, prophesying that lightning would strike her down on the day and at the time when it happened. Yet neither the admirer nor the poem could be found. 3. A preacher in Nevers, who persistently railed against the nearby Babylon, had cursed its devil daughter and, having heard his prayers, the Lord struck her down. Although the Rev. Cecil Carstens denied this rumor, some who had heard a sermon or two of his, more out of curiosity than conviction, found that he was always cursing some sinner, who might be anybody he didn't like, in terms that would suit any accident that might happen. Everybody who wanted to believe one of these explanations did so, but we assumed that mystery had as usual inspired speculation in all three cases. On the other hand, Murma's survey of Jamma's e-mail revealed a correspondence between Cicada 

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and Firefly that had lasted eleven years, evolving from a mutual love of poetry to a love affair between them.

I showed Emily a dozen versions of "The Me Tree" which Jamma had written over a period of three years. They reminded me of a Portuguese stone mason I had seen building a dry wall one summer. He would inspect a space at the unfinished end of the wall, turn his bald head this way and that, stick his fingers into the crannies; rummage through the clinking stones in his pile looking for the right size and shape, pick one up, turn it over and around exploring it with his fingers, but, shaking his head slightly, put it back and look for a better one; choosing another one, he would try it, pushing, pulling and shaking it; still unsatisfied, he would take it out and look for another. Somehow the right stones fitted the right holes, the new section of the wall rose to the height of the old and the wall grew steadily longer. Once, as the mason sought a stone to fit a hole, a horsefly alighted on his pate, which glistened in the sun, but he didn't even seem to notice. The fly was strutting around looking for a place to bite, when the mason found the right stone and lodged it in the wall. Only then did his hand fly up and slap the fly, which fell dead to the ground. Without even looking, he was already inspecting his next hole. Although we had exchanged greetings when I first arrived, I assumed he had forgotten me. Having discovered a stone that particularly interested him, however, he smiled at me with a gap in his teeth. Then he moved back a yard along the completed wall and disassembled a section of it to replace a stone by the one he had found. Since he had been working on this section when I arrived, I glanced at my watch: "It took you a half hour to build a yard of wall: did it seem like a long time?"

"No. Did it seem long to you?"

He scratched his head: "I will always remember you watching me and telling me that."

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We didn't hear from Abe at the end of the week as Wilma had predicted, so I called him Monday morning and he apologized, explaining that two of his employees had been absent and that he had had to meet with Representative Forthwright. The leader of the Republican majority in the state house had driven up to Concordia on short notice to seek arguments against other members of his party, who were accusing him of too generous a contribution to the research budget when ZU was squandering money on projects that did nothing for the economy. Abe promised to call me back by the end of the week. I reminded him that he had already made that promise last week and that he had even told us he would approve our budget by then. He laughed: "If I repeated 'God willing' after everything I say, I would sound like an imam." Wilma told me that Abe had omitted the part that would interest us most: EH had persuaded a friend on Forthwright's staff that ZU shouldn't support research by an English professor from Michigan when an English professor at ZU could do the job just as well for free and especially when the subject was a ZU alumna. Wilma told Damon that the Michigan professor had done her PhD at ZU, that the director of the project, for whom she had written her dissertation, was a distinguished professor of English at ZU and that all of the other participants in the project were ZU employees. "Nothing for the economy? How about the sale of five or ten thousand copies of a book?"

"Skullthorp's poetry?"

When Wilma accompanied Damon to his Cadillac, he knew she was saving desert for the end of the meal: "Do you know what they call the west end of the fifth floor of Murkington Hall?"

"I don't even know what's on that floor."

"Oh! Well, what do they call it?"

"West Berlin? The wall has fallen."

"I'll be damned!"

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"You are always giving me a quiz... Erich Honecker."

As usual on Thursday afternoon, I was in my office on the seventh floor of Murkington Hall for the hour between my undergraduate course and my graduate seminar, when Si Goldstein appeared at the door: "May I have a word with you?" Everything about Si, from his manners to his dress, would have seemed too perfect to me even if he hadn't been one of my worst enemies and the chairman of my department, synonyms to which my career had accustomed me. The adjective that summed him up for Murma and me was prissy. To his many admirers and defenders, we had always conceded that he was handsome, charming, subtle, intelligent... maybe too intelligent? We also admitted that he had excellent taste in art and music. Didn't the few who had heard him play the piano consider him an accomplished musician? Once we had made all of these concessions, however, we couldn't ignore his prissiness. Seeing him at my door activated a response conditioned by years of experience: "Si!" I shouted, jumping to my feet. "Come in, have a seat. I haven't seen you in ages. How is your book coming along?" I knew the noise and bustle would embarrass him, not because they were hypocritical, but rather because everybody within earshot would savor the irony. The allusion to his book twisted my knife in his wound since his administrative duties had delayed it. He couldn't have helped resenting my greeting, but he had perfected the art of concealing everything he felt and displaying what he wanted others to perceive, a discipline admired by allies like Mumpet and Sinkovitch. You knew you were out of favor when you seldom saw him or heard from him and could only reach him by trying several times. When he came to see you in your office, however, you were really in trouble because the secretaries could hear the slightest whisper in his office despite closed doors, which he always closed. "Do you mind if I close your door?" he asked me ominously.

The precautions he took in approaching the trouble reminded me of Vauban laying siege to a fortress. I couldn't help smiling, which Si didn't 

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like, but my smile widened as his trenches zigzagged towards one of my bastions. By now, you may have guessed that I had caused a scandal by seizing an opportunity I wasn't competent to exploit, while excluding others who were and by engaging people ignorant of Skullthorp's poetry to edit it rather than those who had demonstrated their interest and enthusiasm. My laughter echoed up and down the hall, as George and others told me afterwards. Si cringed slightly. I asked him: "Are you speaking as a professor in the same department with the same rank or as the chairman of the department?"

"The distinction seems articificial to me."

"No. I am representing colleagues who rightly complain that you have treated them unjustly and that you are exploiting Skullthorp's succession for personal gain."

"What do you mean?"

"Do you realize what you are saying?"

"Since you refuse to put an end to this outrage voluntarily, I will have to use other means..."

He smiled: "Don't you think your accusation is a little crude?"

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He stood up, reached for the doorknob and said: "I can't wait until the next time you accuse me of avoiding you when you have important questions to ask."

What wouldn't EH and his allies try next? As Abe kept us waiting into a third week, I told Wilma I was afraid he had sent EH a xerox of our budget. "Afraid?" she laughed. "Of course he did! He sent him one as soon as he had read it himself. It's strictly against the rules, of course, so he kept it confidential. Don't worry: I have already taken it into account. If you or your friends detect any leaks, tell me right away." Since I was calling from 327 Tree Shadow Mews, I alerted the others at once. Despite the cloud over our budget, we continued to work away merrily, finding, showing, discussing and deciding. A consensus was evolving over the organization of our research and the analysis that would follow. We would be ready to start in a week or two, which would leave Cary a week or two before he left. Meanwhile, we had fallen into a pleasant but laborious routine, accustoming ourselves to arrivals and departures as Cary and I taught our courses and Emily commuted to Ann Arbor for hers. Everybody took a turn driving over to the Seven-Eleven to buy drinks for lunch and even Cary took his for the sake of our "worker's paradise." We also took turns in producing a surprise for lunch: Solomon served us cappuccinos; Emily, egg drop soup -- to prepare Cary for China --; Edie, tortillas -- "Where's the icewater?" yelled Murma -- ; Cary himself, Welsh rarebit -- "Too good to be good for me!" -- Murma, puffs from Penny Hedgecroft's recipe and I, miniature Butterfingers in remembrance of my little boyhood. "Everybody's in a league against me!" exclaimed Cary snapping his suspenders, which were purple and fuchsia that day. When the refridgerator door opened, Ombre inspected the contents and, while we ate, he sat behind Emily waiting for an opportunity. She was elbowing him away from the edge of the table, where he had put his front paws, when the phone rang: Abe asked Cary and me to stop by his office sometime that afternoon.

If he had approved our budget, he would have told us over the phone. I tried to alert Wilma, but Frau Klingelstedt said she was in Mapleton testifying before the House Committee on Higher Education. Evidently Abe had picked that day on purpose. Our budget was "basically sound," he told 

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us, but he wanted us to consider the possibility of replacing the three hired workers we had requested by graduate students and young faculty who wouldn't cost anything. Weren't there any who had already begun to specialize in contemporary American poetry? They would do a better job and our project would show how education and research complement each other.

Cary: "No."

Me: "Both the whole and all of its parts."

"This time it's going to be different."

"There are no current graduate students or young faculty who have already begun to specialize in contemporary American poetry. There is one of each who have been saying they want to for three weeks. As the only scholar on this campus who has published extensively in the field, I can say that I don't want them working for me."

"Why did you send EH a xerox of our budget?"

"The proposition you want us to consider came straight from EH. Basically is his favorite cliché. Asking someone to consider a possibility is the language he always uses to introduce a measure that he has already taken. When he asked me to consider the possibility of moving to the west end of Murkington Hall, he had already arranged for movers from Buildings and Grounds to help me the next day. Returning to my office, I found some graduate students waiting for me so they could see how much room they would have for their new lounge."

"If you promised EH to get jobs for Tom Sprinkle and Delly Cooper, you will have to renege on your promise. I already turned them down. Let's not even talk about Priss Charitzky."

"We don't need any more chefs in our kitchen. All we need are cooks to carry out our instructions. Besides, EH cuisine?" Cary pinched his nose: "No thanks!" 

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Abe was smiling almost as if he liked what we were saying. "Sorry about the cliché! I hear them so often that I repeat them without realizing it. I also plead guilty to asking people to consider a possibility. What else can I say when I face some every day who swear that they are not going to give an inch? Fortunately, most of them are more reasonable than that and, sooner or later, they give two. Otherwise I would lose my job."

"You are simplifying: the two inches you are asking us to give are the same that EH wants for himself and he has no right to them. I bet nine of the last ten budgets you approved provided for the same kind of clerical support that we are asking for."

He managed to put his decision off another week, but then Wilma gave him a scare. Some ZU trustees had invited her to have a drink with them after her testimony before the Higher Education Committee. They were considering a possibility too, that of establishing a branch of ZU in East Mammoth, which was across the Quiroga River from Mammoth on the Zenia side. Abandoned factories lined the river front while tentacles of row housing followed the valleys back into the hilly countryside where nothing much grew. Unemployed blacks, hispanics and other ethnic groups, who despised each other as much as they despised the whites "on da udder side," identified themselves with the valley they occupied. Although East Mammoth embarrassed the governments on both sides, the safest politics had consisted in inviting the other side to do something about it. A new airport, a commuter railroad, a stadium... Such projects never seemed either to pick up steam or peter out. Since East Mammoth was in Zenia, however, "da udders," as they called themselves regardless of ethnic distinctions, began to vote (always dangerous!) and their representative, a baptist clergyman, began to make speeches that enraptured the media. Soon the people who decided things on both sides of the river began to talk to each other about doing something together. Since technology had become the solution for all problems, an idea filtered down from the higher-ups to the lower-downs that ZTech or ZU or both should establish a branch 

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in East Mammoth. Everybody agreed that higher education was a ski lift to high tech.

WZTV let the broadcasting majors in the School of Journalism have a few hours every week to "do their thing." They in fact called their most popular program "Doing Your thing," a title in which they took such pleasure that we called it "Doing their cute little thing." Cute certainly described the hosting couple, who lavished their smiles and laughs on us in imitation of the professionals they admired. Every week, they invited two kinds of guests, someone important and students qualified to question him. Wilma held the record for most frequent invitations and, after testifying before the House Committee on Higher Education, she appeared on "Doing Your Thing" to answer questions about it. She had a knack for disclosing news that not only interested the public in general, but also implied subtle messages to certain individuals. The opportunities and challenges of establishing a branch in East Mammoth, she said, included staffing it with experienced and capable administrators and professors. This remark must have disturbed those whose skills didn't suit them for such a pioneering adventure and particularly the ones who were making trouble for her. Abe called me the next morning to say that he had finished reviewing our budget and had approved it without reservation. There was jubilation at 327 Tree Shadow Mews.

Declining a promotion to a higher level of the administration usually disqualified you for further advancement. But Wilma's veiled threat, as Cary warned us, would only drive EH underground. His next thrust came from an unexpected quarter and there was no way to prove that it had come from him. I met my Voltaire seminar the next Thursday afternoon and, no sooner had I made my first assertion than an attractive French student named Corinne Verneuil questioned the truth of it. In none of our previous meetings had she done anything like that; on the contrary, she had cooperated with me and the other students in sustaining a constructive discussion. In order for all to prepare for this discussion, I sent them an outline of the plan I would follow by e-mail a few days before we met. This method, which I had been using for several years, had nearly always resulted in willing or even enthusiastic participation. At the previous meetings of the seminar, Corinne had participated in the discussion as 

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eagerly as the other students and I would have ranked her third among the seven students. This time, however, I discovered that she had rededicated her skills and efforts to distracting and delaying the rest of us. She challenged me to prove every statement I made and justify every question I asked, so that we steadily fell behind on our schedule. Undergraduate students would have reacted with impatience and anger, but graduate students tend to view such conflicts with curiosity, reserving their sympathy for the winner. When I saw that my explanations only raised further doubts and objections, I turned to the other students, but Corinne was whispering to her neighbor.

For that class, I had assigned the final chapter of Voltaire's Siècle de Louis XIV, which relates the dispute over the Jesuit missionaries' tolerance of ancestor worship by their Christian converts in China. I not only wanted my students to discover for themselves the extraordinary consequencies of this forgotten event, but also the enlightening effect of background knowledge in the study of literature. This background would enable them to understand the complexity of Voltaire's irony: on one hand, he was attacking Christians, Catholics and the Jesuits all three; on the other, he was admitting the intelligence and learning of the order that had given him an education for which he felt indebted. I drew the students' attention to the remark in which he imagined the Chinese emperor's reaction to a decision affecting his empire by a prince (the pope) reigning over another empire thousands of miles away. I soon discovered that Corinne already knew this background, which she had anticipated and studied on her own. The enthusiasm with which the other students reacted when I explained it to them irritated her, so she tried to dampen it by ironical remarks suggesting that they had missed the point. Raising her forefinger in the French manner, then waving it at me, also French but out of place, she finally intervened without waiting for me to call on her to reject the importance I had given the background, the chapter and Voltaire's religious polemic in general. The background concerned an event that had little impact on the contemporary world, the chapter deserved the neglect from which I had tried to save it and the polemic was an impertinent sideshow wasting my students' time. A few of the other students exclaimed, a few laughed and a few gasped, but all watched to see how I would react. I congratulated Corinne on her investigation of the background and regretted that she had come to evidently erroneous and 

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apparently preconceived conclusions. Now the class awaited her reaction so she satisfied them by accusing me of trying to dictate to her. She was trying to hit the ball so hard that I couldn't return it and hoping that her fellow students would cheer.

After a long silence, I invited the class to take our usual halfway break, which they always spent smoking in the hall, but I told Corinne I wanted to talk to her. Shutting the door, I took a few more minutes to reconsider conclusions that I had already drawn. Although EH had found a way to turn her against me, he had probably relied on one or two intermediaries to do it. Perhaps Mumpet, who had manipulated graduate students before; Sinkovitch preferred direct action. I hardly recognized Corinne, whose face had hardened into a stubborn hostile glare.

"Eh bien, Madame, auriez-vous envie de vous expliquer?"

"Non, Monsieur, je n'ai rien à expliquer."

"Ma conduite?"

"Que voulez-vous dire, Monsieur?"

"Je n'ai pas l'habitude, Monsieur, d'accepter des remarques personnelles."

"... J'en ai besoin."

"Je ne comprends rien à ce que vous dites, Monsieur." 

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"Tenez, Madame, je vais vous donner un choix: ou vous abandonez le cours tout de suite et j'arrangerai cela avec le 'registrar' ou vous continuez à le suivre aujourd'hui à condition de ne plus rien dire, car n'avez-vous pas déjà dit assez? Dans le second cas, prenez rendez-vous pour me voir dans mon bureau."

"Mais... On n'a jamais... C'est inadmissible!" each at a higher pitch.

Angry sigh: "Je reste."

She hissed: "Oui!"

The second hour was going well even though Corinne was fuming. Arrogance had spoiled her appearance; frustration improved it. Since I was enjoying the spectacle, a smile may have betrayed me. After a few sighs and shrugs, she exploded, contradicting the proposition I happened to be saying. I don't know why it seemed funny to me, but I burst out laughing and the others did too, which disconcerted her. She had a serious disposition and wanted to be taken accordingly. "Vous vous oubliez, Madame," I told her. "Nous parlerons de cela quand vous viendrez me voir." Twenty minutes later, a second outburst occurred and I had to tell her: "Ecoutez, Madame: je vous ai donné le choix entre l'abandon du cours et la continuation sous condition de vous taire. Vous avez choisi de rester, mais voici la deuxième fois que vous avez parlé, donc je suis obligé de vous demander de partir." Shock and anger riveted her to her seat for a rebellious minute, but then she put her books in her bag, headed for the door and, after a ferocious glance at me, exited. After class, she was waiting for me with the same look on her face and she asked to see me in my office. Since it was late in the afternoon, we saw nobody as we walked past locked doors down to the elevator. A door slammed somewhere upstairs reverberating throughout the building, which, like all buildings where many people congregate every day, appeared sinister when empty. I thought of a guard taking a prisoner to his cell, but which one of us was the guard and which one, the prisoner? The elevator seemed to press the space around us as if to push us closer together against the will of both. When we left the elevator on the seventh floor, however, I felt strangely 

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relieved and I glanced at Corinne with a smile I neither intended nor could explain. 

We entered my office, I shut the door and we sat down. I remembered that she usually had an errand to run after the seminar: "Et votre petit garçon?"

"J'ai téléphoné."

To my surprise, however, she was reluctant. "Nanterre," she finally admitted.

"C'est comme si vous aviez oublié l'ambiance de Nanterre jusqu'à cet après-midi."

"On a exagéré cette ambiance."

"N'avons-nous pas le droit de ne pas être d'accord avec vous?"

"Mais... je pense qu'ils étaient d'accord avec moi."

Bristling: "Je n'ai besoin d'écouter personne!" 

"Que voulez-vous dire, Monsieur?" 

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"Ne venez-vous pas de le confirmer?"

Shrill: "Au contraire, je le nie catégoriquement!"

"Bon! C'est bien simple: Vous abandonnerez mon cours et je ferai de sorte que vous ne serez pas pénalisée, sauf les trois 'crédits' que vous serez obligée de récupérer pendant un autre semestre. Je regrette, mais il n'y a pas d'autre remède."

"Vous vous vengez parce que j'ai osé douter des propos que vous affirmiez sans preuves."

"Si vous êtes bien convaincue de cela, c'est une raison de plus. Mais un professeur se vengerait bien mieux en retenant l'élève et en lui donnant la plus mauvaise note possible. D'ailleurs, quelle note auriez-vous eue, s'il y en avait une pour la conduite?"