It was a surprisingly narrow room, considerably smaller than Professor Crandersall’s and, unlike virtually every other room Desmond had been in on campus, it had no view; the single tiny window looked out to a gabled, slate-covered rooftop. He liked it. Already Desmond had begun to weary of Deerforth’s rolling lawns and pampered hedges, all watered hourly despite water bans. The whole campus seemed to be basking in its own loveliness a bit too immodestly, with every manicured tree and artfully designed flower bed lolling and stretching and crying out, “Look at me, look at me!” Books were spilling off his shelves, and the desk was a compost heap of old exams and reams of photocopies. There was a poster of an especially dour and disappointed Melville over his desk. Desmond scanned the room for a photo of Jane, but there didn’t appear to be one, just a small photo on the desk of a plump, disgruntled child. A boy, Desmond guessed. Sybil, whom Thomas claimed to remember fondly but clearly didn’t remember at all, would want the details of the office, especially the unflattering ones.

Thomas offered him the chair at his desk and carefully lowered himself into a stocky easy chair under the eaves, tugging up the legs of his pants as he descended. “It’s a mess, I know,” he said, “but in the soul of this man, there lies one insular Tahiti.” Desmond nodded and Thomas helped him out by adding, “To paraphrase Melville.” Then he quoted a lush, lengthy passage from Moby-Dick about appalling oceans and verdant land and inner peace and joy.

Desmond shifted uncomfortably. He hated these academic conversations in which people traded quotations back and forth as if displaying their most valuable baseball cards. Dinner with Russell’s parents was a more overtly aggressive version of this —a food fight in which facts and figures, not pies, were flung across the table in the hopes of scoring a direct hit. At this moment the only literary quotation he could think of was from Lewis Westerly’s single letter to his eldest son: “Life isn’t worth the toilet paper it’s written on.”

“I’ve been looking for the right moment to talk with you about your book,” Thomas said. “It’s a magnificent piece of work. He was a genius, this Westerly, and you, my friend, were a genius for uncovering him.”

Embarrassingly undeserved praise, but he’d take it. Certainly no one else at Deerforth had shown any signs of having read the book. “I had a great deal of fun working on it,” he said, hoping it came off as modesty.

“Now I’ll have to read the novels. As soon as I have a free moment. Is there a logical place to start?”

Desmond gave this serious consideration, seeing the opportunity to introduce a new devotee. “It’s a matter of taste, of course.”