That she had not been born the moment he first set eyes on her, that he found her in the midst of attachments old and new would have dismayed him had he not been numbed into becoming a mere implement in the hand of a designing Nature. Their bodies knew they would make good babies. In the midst of this student seethe and chatter, they were kindred exotics, sheltered children groping after reality, singular in a pride they couldn’t express, gifted but defective, set apart. They promised to each other a fresh genetic start, a beginning of real life. He had no cause for jealousy. As computers know, the past is mere storage, to be called upon only as the present calculation requires. When they were indeed alone together, he asked for no more information than she volunteered, and she was vague. “Oh, I went out a few times with this section man from Projective Geometry, but that was last spring, and I have no idea where he’s got the idea that I owe him something. I can’t believe it was anything I said.”

“How do you know he thinks you owe him something?”

“He keeps sending me unpleasant letters. He’s very angry I won’t go out with him any more. Now he’s angry about you.”

“Me?” Flattered, scared: Owen’s tender stomach registered these incompatibles. “But why me especially? I’m just one of your crowd—why would I stick out?”

“Well,” Phyllis said, “to him you do.” If she was in his arms, she wriggled a little deeper, as if wanting to shrink away from the entanglements her unassuming beauty had brought upon her and, it seemed, on him, too. “He’s right, of course. We’re more—serious?”

“We are?” Again, the abdominal chafing of incompatibles. He wanted life but was scared of it. It was easier to roll over and dream on. In her light-handed, abstracted way Phyllis was tenacious. “O.K.,” Owen said. “What shall we do about—? What’s his name?”

“Ralph.”

“Ralph. How can you be worried about somebody called Ralph? Ralphs are roly-poly, beer-belly types.”

“Not this one. He’s short, and dense. He does boxing to keep fit. One of his letters talked about smashing my face in.”

“Oh my God. Your gorgeous face?” Her skin appeared to him thinner than other people’s; it sunburned in minutes, and a blush stayed on her cheeks for an hour; his lightest touch, he felt, travelled instantly to nerve centers all over her body.

She blushed; even her lowered eyelids blushed. “That’s what he called it, too. Gorgeous. He wrote that he would leave marks on me I would always remember him by.”

“Oh, dear. What kind of section man was he? How was his Projective Geometry?”