It takes Fred nearly ten minutes to convince his friends that he is not really offended, understands their concern, enjoyed dinner, and is looking forward to seeing them again.

As he strides up Flask Walk toward the Underground station through the cold, misty night, Fred’s mood is one of angry discomfort. When things have gone wrong it is no consolation to hear that your friends expected it all along and could have told you so if they hadn’t been so polite.

He doesn’t condemn the Vogelers for their opinion, since when he himself met Roo he also would have said they weren’t on the same wavelength, though in fact the signals she broadcast made him hum like a stereo amplifier. Everything about her seemed to send out an electrical pulse: not only the full round breasts under the orange SOLAR ENERGY T-shirt, but the wide liquid eyes, the flushed tanned skin, and the long braided cable of copper-brown hair from which wiry filaments escaped in every direction.

Their meeting took place during Fred’s second month at Corinth University, at a reception for a visiting lecturer. Roo attended because she had been assigned to take a photograph for the local paper, and Fred because of his admiration for the views of the speaker-which she emphatically did not share, and said so. Their initial impressions of each other were unfavorable, even scornful. Complete polarization was avoided by the discovery of a mutual interest: Roo had been out horseback riding earlier that afternoon, and hadn’t bothered to change; and when Fred learnt that her jodphurs and high waxed boots were functional rather than-or as well as-theatrical, his hostility relaxed. When Roo, with what he would soon come to recognize as her characteristic impulsiveness masked by a deadpan manner, said that if he wanted to go riding with her that weekend he could, he accepted enthusiastically. Roo, as she told him later, was slower to come around. “I was like blown away, I wanted to make it with you so much; but all the time my superego was saying Hey, whoa, wait a minute, this is an uptight woolly liberal professor type, probably a real pig in disguise; all you’ll get from him is grief, baby.”