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companionship,’ where the male and female enjoy being together.”
    “Oh, no,” Haldane demurred, thinking there were gaps in her knowledge, “I know about that, but this is in my mind. I enjoy just looking at you, and touching you.”
    He reached over and took her hand. “It’s fun just to hold your hand.”
    “Unhand me,” she whispered, “before your father returns.”
    He complied, noticing that she could have drawn her own hand back just as easily, but she had not. He slumped back in his chair. “I wanted to tell you something about my heart being like a singing bird, but it didn’t come out that way.”
    He did not know the human voice could carry such gentleness until he heard her answer. “Don’t worry, Haldane. You’ve told me more than you know, and every morning of my life will start with the song of your acidhead skylark.”
    Three valuable seconds ticked by in silence. Helix was the first to speak. “Forget you’re a stuttering poet and be the precise mathematician. Figure, quickly, some way to help me write the epic of Fairweather, for I’ll never help you ungild the lilies of my heart.”
    He had long since planned his answer.
    “Meet me in the morning, at nine o’clock, at the fountain on your campus.”
    She nodded, and lifted her coffee to her lips as his father re-entered the room.
    Haldane arose at seven Sunday morning and took almost an hour to shave twice, trim his nails and toenails, shower, soap, rinse, resoap, rerinse, dry himself, splash his face with aftershave lotion and dry his hands on his bare chest. He was sparing of the hair cream, using just enough to give his hair a sheen.
    Naked before his mirror, he stood for a moment flexing muscles made lithe by judo training. He selected the grey tunic flecked with silver thread with the silver M-5 stitched above the left breast, his matching overcoat with the pale silver lining, and his grey boots of reinforced chamois. His trousers were of grey, fleece-lined denim with a triple-stitched codpiece.
    Dressed and standing before the mirror, he reluctantly admitted that he looked every inch the eighteenth-century boudoir hero. His thin, sensitive face reminded him of John Keats, except for the hair. That full, blond thatch, with a mere innuendo of a wave, was Byronesque, and the eyes, cool, gray, and objective, focused with the calculating ease of a pragmatist to the empirical method born.
    Donning his overcoat with a flourish, he wheeled and strode into the kitchen, where he doffed the coat and breakfasted standing up and bent far over the bar lest crumbs stain the burnished sheen of his tunic.
    Redonning the overcoat, he departed the ancestral demesne, knowing the patriarch, slumbering in his chambers, would awaken to assume his son had gone for early mass, and Dad would be three-fourths correct.
    Enroute to the campus, he drove beside the marina. On his left, the pastel towers mounted Nob and Russian Hills. On his right, a fresh breeze spanked the buttocks of wavelets undulating atop the bay. Above him, clouds no bigger than the breasts of girls accentuated the blue. It was a brisk, stimulating eighteenth-century day.
    He parked and cut across the campus through the trees. As he neared the fountain, the film of branches thinned with decreasing distance, and he saw her.
    She was standing by the fountain reading a book, wearing a shawl instead of a cape and dressed in a skirt that had obviously been ironed under her mattress.
    Chagrined by his own finery, he edged from the cover of the trees.
    She looked up and smiled, extending her hand as he neared her. He bowed and kissed the hand.
    “Spare me the chivalry, Haldane,” she said, withdrawing her hand quickly. “We have bird-watchers on this campus.”
    “I wore my Sunday go-to-mass clothes.”
    “I felt you would,” she said, “so I dressed differently to keep people from assuming we had been to church together.”
    “You’re as clever as you are fair. Are you chilly?”
    “A