“Hi,” he said, surprised.

“I just thought I’d drop in,” she said. “I don’t use the phone any more.”

“I’m painting,” he said, partly as an excuse: he wasn’t sure he wanted her in the house. What would she demand from him?

“Can I help?” she asked, as though it was a big treat.

“Actually I was about to stop for the day,” he lied. He knew she would be better at it than he was.

He made tea in the kitchen and she sat at the table and watched him.

“I came to talk about Blake,” she said. “I have to do a paper.” Unlike him she was only a Graduate Assistant, she was taking a course.

“What aspect?” Morrison asked, not interested. Blake wasn’t his field. He didn’t mind the earlier lyrics but the prophecies bored him and the extravagant letters in which Blake called his friends angels of light and vilified his enemies he found in bad taste.

“We each have to analyze one poem in Songs of Experience. I’m supposed to do the ‘Nurse’s Song.’ But they don’t know what’s going on in that course, he doesn’t know what’s going on. I’ve been trying to get through to them but they’re all doing the one-up thing, they don’t know what’s happening. They sit there and pull each other’s papers apart, I mean, they don’t know what poetry’s supposed to be for.” She wasn’t drinking her tea.

“When’s it due?” he asked, keeping on neutral ground.

“Next week. But I’m not going to do it, not the way they want. I’m giving them one of my own poems. That says it all. I mean, if they have to read one right there in the class they’ll get what Blake was trying to do with cadences. I’m getting it xeroxed.” She hesitated, less sure of herself. “Do you think that’ll be all right?”

Morrison wondered what he would do if one of his own students tried such a ploy. He hadn’t thought of Louise as the poetry-writing type. “Have you checked with the professor about it?”