“No, really,” he says. “You’d hear guys say all the time, ‘You know that Mary is probably one of the prettiest girls here, but no one can ever talk to her during class. She’s always sitting in the front, asking all those questions.’ But I loved that. I thought she was the most magnificent person I had ever seen.”

“Oh.” She blushes.

“Really.” He nods. “But I was too afraid to talk to her.”

“That’s right.” She looks at him. “Until the election.”

He smiles. “I was the fifth generation in my family to go there, and three of them had been class presidents.”

“And the one was later on the board,” she says, raising her eyebrows conspiratorially. As if there weren’t a handful of people in this room on the board at an Ivy.

“So naturally, everyone thought I would run,” he said. “The only problem was, I was an engineering major who wanted to spend his off time drinking beer, not in long meetings about budgets for student clubs.”

A smile breaks across my face. I can’t help but laugh at that; I love when old people talk about their days partying.

“So,” he continues, “I went to Mary with a proposition. I’d be her campaign manager.”

“I hadn’t even thought about running at that point,” she says. “But he had all these ideas from his uncles’ campaigns and was so sure I could win.” She shrugs. “So I said ‘why not?’”

I nod and take a sip of champagne.

“Well naturally, I lost terribly.” She laughs. “What would you expect—a year before, they were split down the middle about whether to let women in at all. They weren’t going to make me their president.” She grimaces at the mere thought. “But I’ll tell you this...” She leans in, like she is going to tell us a secret. “We shook up that campus. We campaigned hard, and had debates on real issues, about feminism and the war protests—none of the stupid popularity contest stuff that usually dominated. And we won most of the girls and a good chunk of the boys. That wasn’t enough, of course, because there were only, what, a thousand girls on campus at the time. I still have some of the letters people wrote to the school newspaper, supporting me, hanging in my office on the Hill. So then—” she points a finger at her husband “—the day after they announced the results, he asked me out. Only took him four months of seeing me every day.”

“Well it would’ve been unprofessional to ask in the middle of a campaign,” he says.

“That’s...” Sara clears her throat. “That’s really lovely.”

I turn to her, but her glassy eyes avoid mine.