“Because I’m here on scholarship,” I smiled. “You’ve heard of those?”

Her gaze was cool and unembarrassed. “That was foolish, wasn’t it? You must be hell-bent on being a lawyer.”

“I guess I must be.”

She inspected me with mock gravity. “I think the problem is that you don’t look like one. More like Warren Beatty with a mean streak.”

“Now you tell me, when I’ve got student loans to my eyeballs.”

She smiled again, then wrinkled her nose and batted at a near curl of smoke. I stopped reaching for a cigarette. “Maybe we should find air someplace.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You don’t sing, do you?”

“I don’t even hum,” I grinned. “Plus I’m a virgin.”

Her smile returned. “It’s your schedule,” she said, and allowed that I could walk her home.

We took the gravel path to Branscomb Quad, hands in our pockets, talking back and forth in the pale fall sunlight. Leaves crunched beneath our feet and there was the rich, damp odor of more leaves burning. Her father was a lawyer, she was telling me, which was where she got her notion of how they looked and acted. “Maybe you should be one,” I remarked. “You don’t look like Warren Beatty.”

She shook her head. “I don’t burn like that—whatever he’s got that makes him a brilliant lawyer. I’ve never been sure I wanted to.” She frowned. “He needed a son—someone to do what he does. The best I can do for him is have one.”

“Is that the program, then? Kids?”

Her shoulders curled downward. “It’s Daddy’s. He’s not always wild about the boys who come home but he wants a son from me.”

I smiled. “Too bad he can’t just start without you.”

“Oh, I want one, too, someday. I think most women do”—she looked wryly across—“no matter what they tell you in the middle of the night.”

I laughed. “Then you didn’t believe me?”

She smiled back. “About being a virgin? You don’t seem the type.”

I shrugged, saying carelessly, “Easier not to be, these days.”

“Easier to be a man, period.” She became abruptly solemn. “Sometimes I wish Daddy had gotten what he wanted.”

I was thinking she was funny, flip, and serious by turns, perhaps a little frightened under the cool. “If you were a man,” I said easily, “I wouldn’t have noticed you. And too many of them are lawyers already. After two years of this I can think of better things.”

“I’m an English major now,” she shrugged. “Shelley, Keats, and Adam Bede, and all functionally useless. But I paint a little.”

The last sounded like more than a throwaway. “There are things you can do with art. Teach, maybe.”