He saw, there in the enhanced light of this high-domed chamber, that he was adding to her burdens—she was already fending off many suitors, many potential coffee-mates. He tried another joke, taken from the lecture they had just heard, which had touched on the Turing machine. “That’s not an if/then,” Owen assured Phyllis. “No necessary consequences. It’s more an n plus one. You’re n, n for ‘knows it all,’ and I’m a one, meaning ‘simpleton.’ I’m a simple scholarship hick who is dying to ask you about”—he snatched at another phrase from the lecture, Klein’s concluding phrase—“ ‘primitive recursion.’ ”

“That’s what it’s going to be all about, primitive recursion,” she prophesied, turning away after an upward glance at the clock. There was a characteristic look, he would learn, a regretful gaiety in the moment of parting, that she would convey over her shoulder; she was never lovelier, with more affection in her smile, than when saying goodbye. “And I don’t know it all,” she added, leaving his direct question unanswered.

But she did, as winter bore down upon the school, share coffee and then more with him. Why? What did she like about him? She was a year older than he, as Elsie had been a year younger, and Owen saw her as a creature above him, in advance of him, moving easily in these realms of enlightenment. In MIT’s forest of fact and concept he had at first felt lost, but his marks were all right and got better as he blended in and his interests narrowed. He was tall, thin then, with a thick head of soft hair, darker than his father’s wispy brown; he let it grow carelessly long, in that strictly barbered era. Where so many of the high achievers were bespectacled Asian-Americans and pudgy Jews, Phyllis must have liked the big-boned way Owen stood taller than she; they looked good walking together. Though never athletically competitive in the public schools of Pennsylvania, he had a nervous wiriness that, in those daydreaming farmhouse years, he had worked up into minor feats of agility—juggling three tennis balls, hopping over a broom held in both hands before him, taking harmless pratfalls on the steel-edged stairs, thus alarming Phyllis and making her laugh when she saw he was unhurt. He loved seeing the blood of surprise pinken her pale, thin-skinned face. His mock injuries parodied a wish to abase himself before her that was real enough—the clown, the pretender, daring to present himself before the princess.