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former, not the latter. Mona and Welby Utell are faithful to each other after their fashion. Nice folk. I’ll introduce you to them some time.”
    “Oh! … That would be interesting, yes,” replied Thompson. “Good-by.”
    The warning buzzer sounded for classes. Norman stopped fingering the little obsidian knife he used for slitting envelopes, swiveled his chair away from the desk and leaned back, amusedly irritated at this latest manifestation of the Hempnell “hush-hush” policy. Not that he had made any particular attempt to conceal the Utell party, which had been a trifle crazier than he had expected. Still, he had said nothing about it to anyone on campus. No use in being a fool. Now, after a matter of months, it had all come out anyway.
    From where he sat, the roof ridge of Estrey Hall neatly bisected his office window along the diagonal. There was a medium-size cement dragon frozen in the act of clambering down it. For the tenth time this morning he reminded himself that what had happened last night had really happened. It was not so easy. And yet, when you got down to it, Tansy’s lapse into medievalism was not so very much stranger than Hempnell’s architecture, with its sprinkling of gargoyles and other fabulous monsters designed to scare off evil spirits. The second buzzer sounded and he got up.
    His class in “Primitive Societies” quieted down leisurely as he strode in. He set a student to explaining the sib as a factor in tribal organization, then put in the next five minutes organizing his thoughts and noting late arrivals and absentees. When the explanation, supplemented by blackboard diagrams of marriage groups, had become so complicated that Bronstein, the prize student, was twitching with eagerness to take a hand, he called for comments and criticisms, and succeeded in getting a first-class argument going.
    Finally the cocksure fraternity president in the second row said, “But all those ideas of social organization were based on ignorance, tradition and superstition. Unlike modern society.”
    That was Norman’s cue. He lit in joyously, pulverized the defender of modern society with a point-by-point comparison of fraternities and primitive “young men’s houses” down to the details of initiation ceremonies, which he dissected with scientific relish, and then launched into a broad analysis of present-day customs as they would appear to a hypothetical ethnologist from Mars. In passing, he drew a facetious analogy between sororities and primitive seclusion of girls at puberty.
    The minutes raced pleasantly by as he demonstrated instances of cultural lag in everything from table manners to systems of measurements. Even the lone sleeper in the last row woke up and listened.
    “Certainly we’ve made important innovations, chief among them the systematic use of the scientific method,” he said at one point, “but the primitive groundwork is still there, dominating the pattern of our lives. We’re modified anthropoid apes inhabiting night clubs and battleships. What else could you expect us to be?”
    Marriage and courtship got special attention. With Bronstein grinning delightedly, Norman drew detailed modern parallels to marriage by purchase, marriage by capture, and symbolic marriage to a deity. He showed that trial marriage is no mere modern conception but a well-established ancient custom, successfully practiced by the Polynesians and others.
    At this point he became aware of a beet-red, angry face toward the back of the room — that of Gracine Pollard, daughter of Hempnell’s president. She glared at him, pointedly ignoring the interest taken by the neighboring students in her blushes.
    Automatically it occurred to him, “Now I suppose the little neurotic will go yammering to Papa that Professor Saylor is advocating free love.” He shrugged the idea aside and continued the discussion without modification. The buzzer cut it short.
    But he was feeling irritated with himself. He only