This kind of confiscation-borrowing, some might call it, though nothing of course is ever returned-is habitual with Professor Miner. Stores are out of bounds-she is no common shoplifter, after all-and the possessions of her acquaintances are usually safe, though you must be careful when lending her your pen, particularly if it has an extra-fine point; she is apt to return it absent-mindedly to her own purse. But planes, restaurants, hotels, and offices are fair game. As a result, Vinnie has a rather nice collection of guest towels, and a very large revolving supply of coasters, matches, paper napkins, coat hangers, pencils, pens, chalk, and expensive magazines of the sort found in expensive doctors’ and dentists’ waiting rooms. She owns quantities of Corinth and University College (London) stationery and a quaint little pewter cream pitcher from a lobster house in Maine, about which her only regret is that she hadn’t taken the matching sugar bowl too. Well, perhaps one day…

It should not be imagined that these confiscations are of common occurrence. Weeks or months may pass without Vinnie feeling any need to add to her hoard of unpurchased objects. But when things are not going well she begins to look round, and annexations take place. Each one causes a tiny ascent in her spints, as if she sat on one of a pair of scales so delicately hung that even the weight of a free box of paper clips on the opposite pan would make hers rise in the air.

Now and then, instead of appropriating something she likes that doesn’t belong to her, Vinnie improves her world by getting rid of something she dislikes. During her short marriage, she caused several of her husband’s ties and a camp souvenir ashtray in the shape of a bathtub to vanish completely. Twice she has removed from the women’s faculty washroom in her building at Corinth an offensive sign reading WASH HANDS BEFORE LEAVING: YOUR HEALTH DEPENDS ON IT.