They no longer shared Introduction to Digital Computer Coding and Logic. She, a senior, disappeared into the counterintuitive exotica of advanced topology—differential manifolds, invariant Betti groups embedded in Euclidean space, duality theorems. Her senior thesis sounded suspiciously like Projective Geometry: she said it had to do with “the topological classification of manifolds of dimensions greater than two.”

“How high can dimensions go?” he asked.

“To n, obviously.”

“I can’t picture it.”

“You can’t, but numbers can. Calculations can encompass however many. Don’t look so disapproving, Owen. Relax. It’s elegant, it’s fun.”

“Fun for you, I can almost believe.”

“I’m at a point where I’m not sure Riemann was right, in the case of some local curvatures.”

“The immortal Riemann of Riemann surfaces? You’re going to refute him? Baby, you’re too much.”

“He wouldn’t mind. He was a saint, of sorts. His father was a Lutheran pastor. He himself died at the age of thirty-nine, of tuberculosis. He left behind notebooks and papers full of ideas he hadn’t had time to publish. The whole universe, you know, is a kind of Riemann surface, according to general relativity.”

Her eyes wore that expression of abstracted steeliness with which she guarded the thought of those she truly, intuitively loved. A set from which Owen was excluded, even as biology and society swept them together. Always Phyllis was to harbor, as she and Owen travelled together in the thorny common world, memories of an Arcadia populated by that rarefied troop of exalted spirits, whether mathematicians or poets, Spenser or Cantor, Hilbert or Keats, to whom Cambridge in its soul was dedicated. Such a dedication does not guarantee the storms of creativity that are posthumously honored, but it curses all tamer weather as second-rate, and makes the real world a rather anticlimactic insubstantial place of exile.