Poetic Justice Read Free

furious, but I am now a teaching assistant, very, very busy, thank you, and only condescending to rally round at Christmas and Easter. Summers I dash off to do research and Winthrop joins me when he can. But you look tired, and here I am chatting away. Let’s have lunch one day at the Cosmopolitan Club.”
    “I’m not a member.”
    “Of course not, dear, though I never understood why. Why
are
you looking so tired?”
    “Meetings. Meetings and meetings. We are all trying, as you must have heard, to restructure the University, another way of saying that we, like the chap in the animated cartoons, have looked down to discover we are not standing on anything. Then, of course, we fall.”
    “But everybody’s resigned. The President. The Vice-President. We’ve got an Acting President, we’re getting a Faculty Senate, surely everything’s looking up.”
    “Perhaps. But the English Department has discovered there is no real reason for most of the things they have been happily doing for years. And the teaching assistants—where, by the way, are you being a teaching assistant? Don’t tell me the College has reformed itself sufficiently to be hiring female, no-longer-young ladies, however talented …”
    “Not them; not bloody likely. I’m at the University College.
Very
exciting. Really, Kate, you have no idea.”
    Kate, looking blank, realized she hadn’t.
    “Really,” Polly Spence said, “the snobbery of you people in the graduate school! We’re doing
splendid
work over there …”
    “Didn’t the University College used to be the extension school? Odd courses for people at loose ends like members of labor unions who only work twenty hours a week and housewives whose children are …?”
    “That was a hundred years ago. There are no more courses in basket-weaving. We give a degree, we have a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, and our students are
very
intelligent people who simply don’t want to play football or have a posture picture taken.”
    “Forgive me, Polly. As one always does when one speaks from ignorance and prejudice, I’m sounding a lousy snob.”
    “Well, you’ll be hearing more from us, just you wait and see. Meanwhile, you must come and have dinner. When I tell Winthrop I’ve met you, he’ll insist. He always finds you so entertaining, like Restoration comedy.”
    “And about as up-to-date. I’m faltering, Polly. If you want to know the truth, I’m thinking of taking up bridge, if not palmistry, astrology, and the finer points of ESP. One of my students has offered to introduce me to a medium with electronic thought waves.”
    “There is no question about it,” Polly said. “We must have lunch at the Cosmopolitan Club. It reassures one.”
    Kate, walking up the stairs of Baldwin, waved a dismissive hand.
    “Kafka,” Mark Everglade said, meeting her in the hall outside her office, “where is thy sting?”
    “I take it,” Kate said, “that is a perpetually appropriate remark these days.”
    “Perpetually. Would you mind teaching a text course next year in the novels of Bulwer-Lytton?”
    “You have to be joking. And what, while I’m doubled over with hilarity, is a text course?”
    “One that uses books, of course. I know we’re all tired on the first day of the semester, Kate, but surely you could have seen that. You remember books? They’re what we used to read before we began discussing what we ought to read. The students have spent the entire summer reforming our course offerings, and it’s now to be text courses.”
    “I have never read Bulwer-Lytton. I have never even discussed reading Bulwer-Lytton, except with some strange student who used to turn up every seven years with another thousand pages on the development of the historical novel. Ah, I see,
The Last Days of Pompeii
is now considered relevant. Perhaps it is, at that.”
    “If only,” Mark Everglade said, “a volcano would come and cover us all with dust. We have done away, as you would have known if you had