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his grandfather clock, which was broken. “We only have three minutes left,” I guessed.
    He didn’t move. “So speak quickly.”
    I did my best to summon my thoughts out of their tortured stupor. “The narrator is a madman. What is there to debate? That’s why it’s juvenile to call this a great piece of art. People have a bad habit of assuming that anything insane is automatically profound. Ergo.”
    “Ergo what?”
    I frowned. “Ergo, that’s it.”
    “You cannot say ‘ergo’ without something following it.”
    My face grew red. It was one of my grammatical inaccuracies that my father must have found too amusing to correct.
    I said, “Ergo, authors uniformly assume madness is deep. They’re wrong. Sometimes, insane people aren’t tortured artists. Sometimes, insane people are just insane.”
    Orville frowned. “Consider the afflictions that drive sane men into madness: love, money, blood, power. The condition of insanity is but an exaggeration of the very qualities that make one human. Wouldn’t you say that madness, therefore, is but a magnification of reality?”
    “No, I would not say that.”
    “Have you never been in love?”
    I blinked. “What?”
    “You. In love.”
    “I don’t think you’re allowed to ask me that.”
    His expression did not change. “I ask only because the memory of being in love will help you understand this poem.”
    “Understand what? What it means to want to kill someone?”
    “Precisely. Passion can take even the most rational men in directions they would not anticipate. Think of what Browning has done to elucidate this point: He has given a murderer a rational voice. He has channeled madness into an intrinsically organized, structured art form. He is encouraging you, Samantha Whipple, to recognize sanity within the insane. If you cannot appreciate madness, then you cannot appreciate great art.”
    I said, “I’m sure the woman being strangled had a hard time appreciating this man’s art.”
    “She’s a fictional woman.”
    “That’s what they all say.”
    I waited. Orville glanced at his watch. “Very well, Samantha—we will continue this conversation another time. You may leave.”
    He stood and walked to his teapot on the opposite side of the room. I stayed where I was. We didn’t say anything. I picked up my violated essay and shoved it into my bag.
    “Have you ever been in love?” I asked.
    Orville looked back at me and let out a bark of a laugh. “I’m a great deal older than you are.”
    “I mean, properly in love,” I clarified. “The kind of love you strangle people over.”
    The dishes gave a clank. I couldn’t tell whether that meant yes or no. I imagined a horde of secret lady admirers falling all over him, one by one, getting caught in the spokes of his bike as he moved around the city.
    “You probably just haven’t met the right girl yet,” I said, giving a sweet smile. “When you meet someone you really want to kill, I bet you’ll know.”
    He brought a fresh cup of tea back to the center of the room and set it down on the table. He was a very tall man and the teacup was miniature in comparison.
    “Do you have somewhere to be?” he asked.
    I blinked. With the lesson over, a switch seemed to have turned off in his mind, ending our relationship for the time being. He sat down and unfolded the newspaper in front of him. I was unused to sudden coolness in teachers. My father had always been the same person in and out of the classroom. After a day of lessons, he’d take me down to the grocery store and we’d count the lobsters in the tanks. Orville was silent, and I couldn’t help but think that all I had done was rent him for the hour.
    I slung my bag over my shoulder, and slipped out of the room unnoticed.

CHAPTER 3
    A few weeks later, when I was en route to my first dinner in the Great Dining Hall, I discovered that I had made the front page of the Hornbeam , Old College’s student newspaper.
    LAST LIVING BRONTË DESCENDANT