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local community college on the strength of a doctorate from Tulane, gained after his graduation from Notre Dame. He had taken early retirement.
    â€œHe spent his life teaching. Now he says he wants to educate himself.”
    â€œI’d love to meet him.”
    â€œNo, you wouldn’t.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œHe’ll talk philosophy to you.”
    It sounded like heaven. Francie had been smitten by the Socratic dialogues in her freshman year and had taken a philosophy course every semester since. She wondered if Paul, too, might mature into the man he described his father as being.
    â€œIt’s too bad about the golf,” she said diplomatically.
    â€œTragic. He always beat me when we played.”
    â€œAre you sure you didn’t let him beat you?”
    Paul was shocked. The point of golf was to score lower than your opponent, whoever it was. The thought that he might ease up out of deference to his father was incomprehensible.
    Whatever Paul’s future potential, she had to face the fact that right now he was a jock—a student athlete, in the phrase, for whom classes were a nuisance. Nonetheless, she had tried to interest him in Roger Knight.
    One of the perks of the St. Mary’s student is the ability to enroll in courses at Notre Dame—and vice versa, of course, though the traffic was largely in one direction. Thus it was that Francie had discovered Roger Knight, the Huneker Professor of Catholic Studies, drawn to a course titled “Descartes As Catholic Author.” From the first day she had been enthralled. They had discussed Maritain’s The Dream of Descartes and the evidence that Descartes had kept his vow to make a pilgrimage to the House of Loreto in gratitude for the philosophical revelation vouchsafed him in a dream. The account of this dream, which Roger Knight compared in some detail to the Memorial of Pascal, has not survived, but the philosopher had it with him when he died in Stockholm. The fact that none of this interested Paul had put a severe strain on their friendship, which nearly did not survive in their junior year.
    â€œGive me plants any day.”
    â€œPlants?”
    â€œI’m taking botany.”
    Francie said nothing, assuming it was a jock course, an easy C or even B for student athletes, not too demanding. But Paul had followed it up with others, so maybe it wasn’t just easy credits.
    Paul was only one of the targets of opportunity that had brought Francie to campus with her mother. The other was Roger Knight.

8
    After receiving his doctorate in philosophy from Princeton, Roger Knight, obese, eccentric, and brilliant, had found himself to be academically unemployable. A lesser man might have repined and lamented his fate, but Roger almost welcomed it. Learning had never been pursued by him with a utilitarian purpose—future employment—but for its own sake, and nothing in his depressed circumstances prevented him from continuing that pursuit. And continue it he did, a freelancer in the world of scholarship, in contact via e-mail with like-minded souls around the world, pursuing now one spoor of his interests and now another. His brother, Philip, a private detective, had after suffering his second mugging decided to absent himself from felicity awhile and moved from Manhattan up the Hudson to Rye. He placed ads in the yellow pages of various telephone directories around the country, identifiable only by profession and an 800 number, and accepted such employment as promised unusual reward. Eventually, Roger, who accompanied Phil when he accepted a client, himself applied for and received a private detective licence. And so their life might have continued if Roger’s monograph on the English writer who styled himself Baron Corvo had not enjoyed an unforeseen success. Roger had become a Catholic while at Princeton and was drawn toward the study of such unusual subjects as Corvo, whose real name, insofar as reality