“—has too many books. I know. I keep telling Eustace, but he says they’re his tools, and he never knows which ones he’s going to need. A book can wait untouched for twenty years, and suddenly, in the middle of some dreary scholarly article, he desperately needs it. It’s horrible—think of the dust mites. I try to get the cleaning women to dust them once a year and they quit instead.”

“They get frightened, Mother,” her daughter softly interposed, glancing apologetically in Owen’s direction.

But there was no need to apologize. All parents embarrass their children. Owen’s had seemed to him impossibly sad, putting on a quarrelsome show of discontent and maladjustment for all on Mifflin Avenue to see. Phyllis’s, in comparison, seemed model residents of Cambridge, as obedient to their grooves as the little interlocked figures that jiggle on the hour out of a Swiss clock. Owen liked this quick small lady of the house, with her clipped gray hair and upper eyelids collapsed upon her lashes. His experience with small women—Grammy, Elsie—had generally been good.

“Phyl tells us you’re quite brilliant, over there at the other place.”

“Oh, no, I’m just another plodding electrical-engineering major. It’s your daughter who—”

“—outsmarts the professors,” Carolyn Goodhue finished for him. “We find it so strange, Eustace and I—mathematics, we thought for years it was a phase she was going through, an awkward age. Girls do, of course, and unlike boys they find such devious ways to rebel, all the time with these sweet smiles so you can’t fault them. But, seriously, dear”—to her daughter—“your father and I are immensely proud. We boast. We put on brave faces when our friends tease us, asking why would a girl who could have waltzed into Radcliffe, or Wellesley or Bryn Mawr if she didn’t like boys, why would she want to go down the river to a place so—”

“Grubby,” Owen finished for her.

“Mother,” Phyllis intervened. “We’re grubby because we have to stay up all night, memorizing facts, and most of the boys do things with their hands.”

“Not too many things, I hope,” Mrs. Goodhue snapped, blinking rapidly when Owen laughed: he had never heard an off-color joke from Phyllis, they somehow didn’t enter her head.