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week after the winter term had opened, he went to his carrel in the university library to read. The campus was under deep snow, ice-crusted by weeks of boreal cold. Trudging up College Hill on a sunny January afternoon, he was blinded by the wind and the glare. The quiet world inside the double glass doors of Bride Library was warm and welcoming.
    His small study was on the lower level, its thick-paned narrow window half submerged beneath the snow line outside. Only a pale winter light came, filtered through the needles of an adjoining pine grove. The fluorescent lamp in his cubicle was heartening and businesslike. Waves of heat shimmered against the lower windowpane.
    The course he had designed for the spring semester consisted of works from early-twentieth-century vitalism—Frank Norris, Dreiser, Kate Chopin, James Branch Cabell. A hundred years late, his students were not entirely immune to its appeal. In the sterile ease of his afternoon's refuge, laboring under the same sadness he woke to each morning, he settled down with Cabell's
Jurgen.
It was a book he had liked very much as a youth, although recently he had seemed to run out of new things to say about it. After a weary page or two he went to sleep.
    The exterior light was fading altogether when he heard a gentle rap at the door. It was Phyllis Strom.
    "I'm really sorry to bother you here," Phyllis said. Her regrets were genuine because he had ordered her not to disturb him at the library. He stood blinking, running a hand through his hair.
    "I couldn't get you on the telephone," Phyllis said. "But Mrs. Ahearn said you were probably here."
    "She was correct." He directed Phyllis to the nearest library table, where there were two vacant chairs.
    "I really am sorry," Phyllis said anxiously. "I know how you like to come here."
    Michael laughed in spite of himself.
    "Just goofing off, Phyllis. What's up?"
    "Well, you know, I waited until the last minute to line up a thesis committee."
    "Right," Michael said. It had been his fault. He had kept her busy through the break, shamelessly overworked her. She had never so much as breathed an impatient sigh. The rumor about beautiful Phyllis Strom, untrue so far as Michael could determine, was that as an undergraduate she had posed for a
Playboy
spread, "The Girls of the Big Ten." In any case, as a graduate student she had become a model of industry, modesty, sobriety and decorum.
    "Well, you know I asked Professor Fischer when I asked you?"
    Michael nodded.
    "Well, I have a third person lined up." When Phyllis told him the name he could not quite make it out. He had heard it around.
    "Professor Purcell." She repeated it for him. "Marie-Claire Purcell. Everyone calls her Lara."
    "She's a political scientist, and her specialty is the Third World," Phyllis explained. "She's real hard to get hold of on campus. Like she doesn't have e-mail and her phone's unlisted."
    "Should I write to her?"
    Phyllis blushed fetchingly.
    "Your wife said you didn't have time to write until after term. So I wondered if you could catch her on campus today. I told her you might stop in."
    Michael watched her for a moment.
    "I guess I owe you, Phyllis. You were a lot of help to me this term."
    "I feel so badly about pushing it," said the contrite but determined Phyllis Strom. "But it's so important to me."
    "Is it? Is she so terrific?"
    "Yes," Phyllis said simply, "she's great. She studied at the Sorbonne. She has a couple of books and she's been a television journalist."
    "Wonderful." He had a vague sense of Mme. Purcell. One of the overpaid Eurotrash faculty who frequented each other's houses for edible food and adult conversation and liked to photograph roadside diners and picturesque gas stations. "Lucky us. Sure," he told Phyllis. "I'll call her. Is she in her office this afternoon?"
    "Until four-thirty," Phyllis said with a guilty smile. "Please?"
    And who could refuse Phyllis, wintry nymph with her tasseled elfin cap, frost-nipped little nose and