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in fact the only woman I know, who could do that corny sultriness to such perfection. What would you have done if Tansy had answered? An imitation of Humphrey Bogart? How’s New York? How’s the party? What are you drinking?”
    “Drinking? Norman, don’t you know who this is?”
    “Certainly. You’re Mona Utell.” But he had already grown doubtful. Long-drawn-out jokes weren’t Mona’s specialty. And the strange voice, with its aura of exasperating familiarity, was growing higher all the time.
    “You really don’t know who I am?”
    “No, I guess I don’t,” he replied, speaking a little sharply because that was the way the question had been put.
    “Not really?”
    Norman sensed that those two words cocked the trigger for an emotional explosion, but he didn’t care. He went ahead and pulled it. “No!” he said impatiently.
    At that the voice at the other end of the wire rose to a scream. Totem, slinking past, turned her head at the sound.
    “You beast! You dirty beast! After all you’ve done to me! After you’ve deliberately roused me. After you’ve undressed mc a hundred times with your eyes!”
    “Now please —”
    “Corny sultriness! You… you lousy schoolteacher! Go back to your Mona! Go back to that snippy wife of yours! And I hope you all three fry in hell!”
    Once again Norman found himself listening to a dead phone. With a wry smile he put it down. Oh the staid life of a college professor! He tried to think of some woman who could possibly be entertaining a secret passion for him, but that didn’t lead him anywhere. Certainly his idea about Mona Utell had seemed a good one at the time. She was quite capable of calling them up long distance from New York for a joke. It was just the sort of thing she’d do to enliven a party after the evening performance.
    But not to end the joke that way. Mona always wanted you laughing with her at the finish.
    Perhaps someone else had been playing a joke.
    Or perhaps someone else really… . He shrugged his shoulders. Such an asinine business. He must tell Tansy. It would amuse her. He started toward the bedroom.
    Only then did he remember all that had happened earlier in the evening. The two startling phone calls had quite knocked it out of his head.
    He was at the bedroom door. He turned around slowly and looked at the phone. The house was very quiet.
    It occurred to him that from one way of looking at it, those two phone calls, coming just when they did, constituted a very unpleasant coincidence.
    But a scientist ought to have a healthy disregard for coincidences.
    He could hear Tansy breathing softly, regularly.
    He switched out the light in the hall and went to bed.

4
    As Norman walked the last block to Hempnell the next morning, it struck him with unusual forcefulness just how pseudo was Hempnell’s Gothic. Odd to think how little scholarly thought that ornate architecture masked, and how much anxiety over low salaries and excessive administrative burdens; and among the students, how little passion for knowledge and how much passion, period — even though of a halting, advertisement-derived, movie-stimulated sort. But perhaps that was just what that fabulous gray architecture was supposed to symbolize, even in the old monastic days when its arches and buttresses had been functional.
    The walks were empty except for a few hurrying figures, but in three or four minutes the student body would spill out of chapel, a scattering tide of brightly-colored sweaters and jackets.
    A delivery van came gliding around the corner as Norman started to cross the street. He stepped back on the curb with a shivery distaste. In this gasoline-obsessed world he didn’t mind ordinary automobiles, but somehow trucks with their suggestion of an unwholesome gigantism touched him with a faint irrational horror.
    In taking a quick glance around before he started across again, he thought he saw a girl student behind him, either very late for chapel or else cutting it