“I can hardly wait,” Owen said, more sarcastically than he had intended. He was sounding like a malcontent, a surly know-nothing, and after all that watching at a distance might lose this marvellous girl her first minute on the hook. This was a fastidious, almost transparent fish on his line, with surprising, quick leaps to her talk. She made him feel (and always would) dark, a little thick-blooded, slightly slow and heavy.

“You’re too practical,” she told him. “Mr. Klein wants us to think about how we think. Our so-called thinking is messy, with many little determinations, more or less simultaneous, whereas machines have no intuition, no mass of experience. Normal human illogic won’t do for them. Nothing is obvious to them that isn’t absolutely spelled out.”

“They can do only what we know how to order them to perform, like Lady Lovelace said.” He was parroting Klein, that silky embodied intelligence, who spoke with a retractive tremor, as if voicing anything loudly would jar his delicate brain. “Wasn’t she something, for a woman back then?” Owen added lamely, trying to keep up in the hall, sidestepping and being bumped as Phyllis floated at his side. “She was a number,” he added, a joke to dilute, perhaps, the taste of flirtation in his mouth; for by bringing up Ada Lovelace, Byron’s daughter and Charles Babbage’s handmaiden in the invention of the Analytical Engine, he had hoped to flatter this other mathematically minded female.

“She was,” was Phyllis’s flat reply. She was drifting away; he had failed to engage her. They had come, in the numbered maze, to Room 7, the ten-pillared entrance hall, where right-angled paths diverged. Seeing they must part, and recognizing that this stranger had made an effort, she took a livelier tone: “Didn’t you like, today, the way he diagrammed inference? All these ‘well-formed’ formulas for something so obvious we all know it without thinking twice about it?”

He mustn’t lose her; he must try to rise to her with some provocation, something to carry over to their next encounter. “You’re not practical?” he asked.

The two stood, immobile in the flood of swaddled, pimpled, boisterous bodies hurrying to their next class. “I guess not,” she told him, in her gentle, fading voice. “I love what’s pure and useless.” She shrugged, lightly, apologizing for all of her, the whole length of her pale, pink, diffidently carried body.

“That’s beautiful of you,” he told her. It just popped out of him, too coarse a compliment; he saw her wince. Owen hurried to patch it up: “Look. Let’s have coffee some time—would you like to?”