He was giving her a chance to laugh; he had not expected her to mull it over. “Last year, there was, but this was his idea, not mine. A boy—man, really, he was older than I—I used to see in the summer, who my parents didn’t think was at all suitable.”

“They didn’t, but you did?”

She pursed her lips again, this time keeping silent. She did not like, beyond a point, being probed, and had already taken him in so much deeper than he would have dared hope a mere year ago, when she had been to him just a vision, floating through the halls. “You did,” he concluded.

She didn’t disagree. So: he had rivals lodged in the exterior world, like Jake and Ralph, and rivals lodged in her heart, her secret being, like the tremulously clever Klein and this unnamed man her parents objected to. Owen was learning when to change the subject, encountering a closed door in the corridors of her past. “Was it your parents’ idea to have you become a math major?”

“No: they were rather horrified, they’re such humanities snobs. Literature and the arts are all they care about. To them make-believe is life. Science is vulgar. My father’s specialty is the English Renaissance—the sixteenth and seventeenth century—”

“Thanks,” he interrupted, nettled by their previous conversation and this summer lover she was refusing to talk about. “I know when the English Renaissance was.”

“Of course. Some people don’t. My father doesn’t do just the poets and playwrights, Shakespeare and so on, that everybody knows about, but these prose writers nobody can bear to read any more, Sidney and Bacon and Lyly and Lodge, always writing about Arcadia in this elaborate way—he loves them. That’s where my name came from; all those old poems are full of Phyllises—sprightly Phyllises, naughty Phyllises. I turned out to be a dreamy Phyllis, rather disappointing.”

“Not to me. Nor to a number of others, it sounds like.”

“About ten years ago,” she went on, on her preferred topic, “when the man who teaches eighteenth-century prose had his sabbatical, Daddy took that on, too—Dryden and Bunyan, Addison and Steele, Boswell and Johnson—and he revelled in it, working it up, shelves of this impossibly dry old stuff. He hides in books, my mother says.”

“My father hid in numbers.”