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undergraduates?” Hankster asked. “Or did you just say that to startle us?”
    “I said it because it’s true—and tact isn’t my most notable characteristic. Why is it true? Because of the age of undergraduates—delightful, no doubt, but not for me. As far as I’m concerned, youth is a condition which will pass, and which I prefer to have pass outside of my immediate field of vision. Of course, I have nothing
against
young people—apart from the fact that they are arrogant, spoiled, discourteous, incapable of compromise, and unaware of the price of everything they want to destroy. It’s not that I disagree with their beliefs, or mind if I do disagree. I just prefer those whom life has had time to season.
    “What a long speech. I am certain I ought not to be so emphatic; for one thing, it’s unladylike and mysteriously unbecoming not to cherish the company of the young of one’s own species. Someone must have asked me a question, and now I’ve come all over nasty about children, and quite forgotten what it was.”
    “We are answering the question of why you were chosen to join us,” Klein said. “We felt we could interest you in a college whose students are no longer in the throes of role-playing: older, experienced in the ways ofthe world, mellower on the whole, and totally motivated—self-selected was, I believe, your own phrase.”
    “I see,” Kate said. “And am I to be persuaded to some special action, or only encouraged to cheer in a general sort of way?”
    “Let some of our students into your courses,” Frogmore said. “Get to know them. Find out a bit about what we’re doing, and give us a chance to impress you. Carry our banner in the Graduate English Department any way you see fit, but fight our cause there.”
    “I’ve certainly no objection to a few of your students in my courses, if I can interview them first. As to the fight in the Graduate English Department—you know, I don’t as a rule drink at lunch, but right at the moment I feel the need of what Auden calls an ‘analeptic swig.’ ”
    “You’ve got to admit, Reed, it’s not madly
me.
I mean, can you imagine
one
getting involved in a university power-struggle? ”
    “Then don’t,” Reed said. “What I can’t imagine is why you don’t just say no, but then I, like all outsiders, am having a certain amount of trouble understanding what in the world is going on in that university of yours. Surely you can send this Frogmore chap a firm but gracious note telling him you don’t want anything to do with his silly college.”
    “But am I certain I don’t want anything to do with it? It is, after all, awfully soul-satisfying of them to want me.”
    “And a very clever bunch they are, I must say. Though it is certainly by no means clear to me why the propositionof any old college gets the most careful consideration, while my …”
    “I have yet to refuse one of your propositions, Reed, admit it.”
    “Kate, whenever you start talking like a bad imitation of Nancy Mitford I know that you are not only plastered but worried.”
    “Sweet, perceptive you. Though I must say, I really can’t believe that Auden drank a whole bottle of Cherry Heering.” They were in Kate’s living room late that night and Kate, as she carefully explained, while she had long since admitted she couldn’t write poetry like Auden’s, wanted to discover if she had at least his capacity for alcohol. “You see,” she had told Reed, “Auden went to spend the evening with the Stravinskys and Robert Craft, and he managed to drink a pitcher of martinis before dinner, a bottle of champagne during, and a bottle of Cherry Heering after. Craft thinks he thought the Cherry Heering was Chianti—I rather wish it were, actually. All that affected his labials only slightly and his wit not at all. It had no effect either, apparently, on his stomach, his liver, or his plumbing—not one visit to the loo. Well, I have failed the test—that is, my stomach