“There you are. That’s what I mean about myself. I didn’t think of that at all, but just went right ahead and kissed you. If I had got myself into trouble, it would have been no more than I deserved. But it would have been too bad if I had got you into trouble with me, for it was in no way your fault.”
“Never mind. No harm has been done, and I must admit that I feel flattered by your demonstration. It was quite thorough, to say the least.”
“Do you think so? I’m glad. In my opinion, if you want to kiss someone, you had better do it thoroughly or not at all. I simply can’t stand being pecked at, or pecking at someone else. It’s so disappointing, I mean, and gets no one anywhere.”
“Yes. I see what you mean. But now, unfortunately, I must end this interview. Thank you for coming in, Miss McCall. Now that we understand each other, I’m sure we’ll make out very well until the end of the term.”
“I wish you would call me Maggie. It seems silly to keep calling me Miss McCall after we have become friends. We are friends, aren’t we?”
“Yes, indeed, Maggie. Friends we are.”
“It just goes to show you, doesn’t it? You might think, since you are so clever and all at mathematics while I am so ignorant, that we would have nothing at all in common, or any reason for being friends, but it isn’t true in the least, as we have discovered.”
“True. A common devotion to mathematics may not be the most satisfactory basis for friendship after all.”
“That’s what I mean. Other things are important, too. Well, I had better go now. Good-by, Professor Cannon. After a while maybe you will let me call you Brad. That’s what you’re called by your friends, isn’t it? It’s such a fine name, I think. Much better for a man than Maggie is for a girl. Thank you for not putting me out.”
“Don’t mention it. I greatly prefer having you in.”
At the door, she hesitated and looked back with her grave and provocative smile, and then she was gone. He leaned back in his chair and made a tent, fingers tip to tip, and considered the implications.
Soon, reluctantly, he sighed and stood up and began to gather books and papers, for there was someplace else he had to go and someone else he had to meet.
4
Kansas City was where, and Cornelia York was who. Meeting Cornelia was not in any way essential to Brad’s main purpose in going to Kansas City, but was something incidental that he and Cornelia had worked out between them to add interest and a bit of excitement to what would otherwise have been, for him, a rather dull chore.
In the beginning, at least, it had added interest and excitement, not to say drama, but now unfortunately, again for him, it was becoming more of a bother and a complication than a pleasure.
As Peermont’s most glamorous mathematician, he had been selected to conduct a television class in college algebra. This was flattering to his physical presence, as well as to his professional skill, and he had accepted readily enough in the beginning. However, he had been chagrined to discover that the televised session was scheduled for seven o’clock on Saturday morning, which was a bad day and a worse hour.
In order to reach the studio on time, he was forced to arise at five-thirty at the latest, if he drove to KC the same morning of the telecast, and this was not nearly late enough, especially on Saturday, when he might have lain abed as long as he pleased.
He had mitigated this dreary disadvantage to some extent by driving to the city Friday evening and spending the night in a hotel near the studio, and that was why Cornelia had become incidentally involved. They had decided that it was really a waste of time and opportunity for him to spend the night alone, and so she had been driving in independently and spending it with him.
Cornelia had been first a challenge and later a most satisfactory conquest. A member of the Peermont faculty in the department of foreign languages, appropriately Romance, she was a tall woman who had reached an age somewhere between thirty and forty without appearing to have reached any specific age at all. That is to say, one could have accepted without much question either of alternate contentions that she was a remarkably preserved forty or a mature twenty-five.
Rather tall, she was somewhat too amply endowed to be called willowy, but she succeeded, nevertheless, by tricks of dress and locomotion, to appear to be what she was really not. She wore her black hair bound in braids around her head, sometimes for variety in a knot on her neck, and she affected an air of sophisticated reserve that contrived subtly to suggest banked fires.
It was this subtle paradox of cold and heat that had initially tickled Brad’s fancy. He was both intrigued and challenged. He met her occasionally at faculty functions and devised occasions to meet her casually elsewhere.
To his surprise, she did not seem to be impressed by him, or even to like him very much. This was, of course, intolerable, and he began to develop in connection with her an almost frantic sense of frustration.
He was not the man to bear this philosophically, and if it was far too late for Cornelia’s virginity to suffer assault, her chastity, such as it was, was definitely imperiled.
The peril, if she had known it, would not have disturbed her. She was willing to risk it, even to invite it. What did disturb her, on the contrary, was the oppressive feeling that Brad was, after all, a fraud who was never going to make the pass she had sensed and expected and wanted.
She spent quite a bit of time wondering in both French and English how she could incite him to action without appearing to do so. Finally, after an interval during which they both suffered needlessly, they discovered that they had a common enthusiasm which not only brought them together unexpectedly at a favorable time and place, but also made it possible for them to arrange naturally other times and places equally favorable.
The enthusiasm was for walking in the country — a simple kind of exercise which, when enjoyed together by a comparatible pair, affords all sorts of opportunities for supplementary exercises and enthusiasms. Brad did a great deal of walking because it helped to keep his belly flat and because it was one of the few forms of physical exertion that he honestly enjoyed.
For her part, Cornelia did a great deal because it was part of a picture she had of herself. Anyhow, it had happened one raw, wet Sunday afternoon in early March of this year that they had met beside a hedge of Osage Orange along a country road, and it would have been impossible to imagine a pair more surprised and delighted and covertly calculative of the other’s virtue.
“Why, Brad!” she said. “How delightful to meet you so unexpectedly!”
“How are you, Cornelia? You’re looking exceptionally fine.”
“So are you, for that matter. It must be the country air.”
“If so, I’d like to recommend it for all women. If I didn’t know better, I’d guess you at the moment to be about eighteen.”
“How charming we are today, aren’t we? You ought to walk in the country more often, Brad.”
“But I’m forever tramping about the country. I’m positively addicted to it.”
“Really? So am I. How has it happened, I wonder, that we have never come across each other before?” There was a sparkle in her eyes and her voice.
“However it happened, it was damned bad luck. Now that we have met at last, however, I suggest that we set a better precedent for the future.”
“Agreed. Shall we begin by walking along together?”
He responded by offering his arm, which she accepted and held lightly and released after a minute or two because she wished to avoid the impression of clinging, which was in conflict with her assumed role of a woman sharing equally his masculine pleasure.