She visualizes what must come or has already come of this mass migration: she sees, all over the country-in homes and offices, in libraries and dentists’ waiting rooms-her colleagues, ex-colleagues, students, ex-students, neighbors, ex-neighbors, friends, and ex-friends (not to mention the members of the Foundation Grants Committee). All of them, at this moment or some other moment, are opening the Atlantic, turning its glossy white pages, coming upon that awful paragraph. She imagines which ones will laugh aloud; which will read the sentences out with a sneering smile; which will gasp with sympathy; and which will groan, thinking or saying how bad it looks for the Department or for the Foundation. “Hard on Vinnie,” one will remark. “But you have to admit there’s something a little comic about the title of her proposal: ‘A comparative investigation of the play-rhymes of British and American Children’-well now, really.”

About its title, perhaps; not about its content, as she has spent years proving. Trivial as it may seem, her material is rich in meaning. For example-Vinnie, almost involuntarily, begins composing in her head a letter to the editor of the Atlantic-consider the verse to which Professor Zimmern took such particular exception:

Ring around a rosy

Pocketful of posies.

Ashes, ashes,

We all fall down.

– This rhyme appears from internal as well as external evidence to date very possibly from the Great Plague of 1665. If so, the “posies” may be the nosegays of flowers and herbs carried by citizens of London to ward off infection, while “Ashes, ashes,” perhaps refers to the burning of dead bodies that littered the streets.

– If Professor Zimmern had troubled to do his research… if he had merely taken the time to inquire of any authority in the field-Vinnie continues her imaginary letter-he… he would be alive today.