Poetic Justice Read Online Free PDF Page A

was quoting Forster, whohappened to be writing about India at the time, so it was eye-flies.”
    “Somebody said once—unlike you I never remember where I read things—that if a woman is not beautiful at twenty, it’s not her fault; if she’s not beautiful at forty, it is her fault. Have you ever thought of getting married?”
    “Once or twice, lately. The ramifications of university upheavals are endless. Do you think marriage advisable? One has such lovely friendships with men whose wives were beautiful when they were twenty.”
    “What a dreadfully cynical remark. Married women can have friends; the men feel, if anything, more comfortable.”
    “Meaning you would feel more comfortable now if I were married.”
    “Kate, don’t put words in my mouth. I was …”
    “Answer me honestly, if you want me to help with your beastly crisis.”
    “That’s not fair. People who demand to be answered honestly have already decided what the honest answer is. But you’d be wrong. I wouldn’t be more comfortable with you, but I think I would feel you were happier, particularly in these times of institutionalized uncertainty.”
    “I’ll tell you one thing, Bill,” Kate said, recovering herself. “I have believed, in the words of a first-rate woman scholar who lived to be eighty and was always falling in love with someone, that marriage for a woman spoils the two things that make life glorious: learning and friendship. Somehow, that no longer seems so unquestionably true. Fill up your glass and tell me about Toadwell.”
    “Frogmore. That you haven’t heard of him is absolutely symptomatic.”
    “Oh, come on, Bill, how many deans have I heard of?”
    “Can you name the Dean of Divinity? Law, Graduate Faculties, Public Administration, Business, Engineering?”
    “Not Public Administration.”
    “My point still holds.”
    “I can only name most of the others because of the troubles last spring.”
    “Fair enough. But you can’t name the Dean of the University College?”
    “Frogmore?”
    “Frogmore.”
    “You know, Bill, it is absolutely coming over me in waves that I do not
want
to know the Dean of the University College, or University College, or …”
    “Shall I tell you something? Last spring, when this place was blowing up, there was only one school in it that remained intact.”
    “Don’t tell me, let me guess.”
    “The students of the University College occupied their own building and held it for themselves. They proved to be the only really loyal student body the whole blasted University possessed, and the University, with the gratitude and intelligence that has marked all its decisions, now wants to wash the University College down the drain.”
    “Bill, I’m in Graduate Faculties. I’m planning next year’s curriculum there. I’m going to give a text course in the novels of Bulwer-Lytton, and maybe one in the literature of Emerging African Nations. I’m thinking of emigrating to an Emerging African Nation myself.
    Do you really think you want to try to make this my problem?”
    “Yes, lady, I do. And when your fortieth birthday comes, I shall buy you a specially lovely present for a beautiful and humane woman.”
    “As Polly Spence would say—my God, Polly Spence—four-letter-word-bathroom. Bull’s, that is.”

In our morale must lie our strength.
Two
    “A LL I ask, Kate, is that you listen. Give it a chance. Try to remember that these are people fighting for the life of a school
they
do not need. They all have tenure in other branches of the University. It’s a matter of believing in something.”
    “Even Dean Frogmore?”
    “Even he.” Bill McQuire and Kate were walking toward the Faculty Club next day to attend a luncheon with Dean Frogmore and some senior members of his faculty. Kate had had to cancel two appointments to come, and she did so, finally, only as a favor to McQuire. He had known, and Kate respected him for knowing, that she had learned to refuse any official