They had vowed not to think about it for the duration of the bicycle trip. For, after all, it was out of their hands. They would bicycle all the way to a town called Nelson’s Mills—Gregory knew a place there, an old stone inn, they could stay the night—they would return to the college by late afternoon of the following day; and by then the decisions would have been made, Marya Knauer’s and Gregory Hemstock’s letters prepared for them, everything properly official and irrevocable. It is my pleasure to inform you. . . . It is with deep regret that I inform you. . . . Form letters; formula congratulations or condolences; as resolutely impersonal as if printed out by a machine.

Except of course these were human decisions, Marya thought. Decisions made by men. Not a woman among them.

TALL LEAN LONG-BONED Gregory with a red headband around his forehead; Gregory in a white T-shirt and shorts and runner’s shoes, without socks, looking young and antic as any of his students. Or nearly. (For Gregory was nearly thirty now, two years older than Marya.) His legs were thin but strong, tight with muscle; his thighs flat and hard. Marya admired the curve of his long narrow back as he hunched over the racing bike’s handlebars, she admired the contrast between the sporty red headband and his fine white-blond hair. He had fastened amber plastic lenses over his glasses, had secured his glasses in place with a strip of black elastic, gave every impression of being a serious rider with a serious destination. He and Marya had gone out bicycling a few times on winding country roads in the area but the rides had been easy, companionable, not at all competitive; they’d mostly ridden abreast, talking. Gregory had never been able to talk her into accompanying him on a long trip before—she hadn’t the time, she said, she wasn’t really that confident a bicyclist, and in any case didn’t your mind simply drift onto other things, to the usual worries and problems, on long monotonous rides?

The sport isn’t monotonous, Gregory said. There are only monotonous-minded people.

Marya laughed, chastened. She quite liked Gregory when he put her in her place, deflated her pretensions. She was less comfortable with his mercurial moods—his frequent self-reproach, his melancholy, his outbursts of sentiment, piety, possessiveness. (A year ago he suggested suddenly that they move Marya’s things into his apartment, that they “experiment along those lines” for six weeks or so. Marya hadn’t been inclined to take the proposal seriously.)