Her college 'mother' in the second year had assured her (rather sadly) that Antony was most discriminating in his selection. Her room-mate had been even more positive. She had been the first of the year. This gave Jenny the advantage of being well briefed in the Wilkesian technique, but being forewarned she was discovering did not prevent her from being disarmed. Antony was one of the few people she had met who really did talk in long well-organized speeches like people in plays. Most of her acquaintance, she realized, hardly ever strung together more than a couple of dozen words at a time except when telling an anecdote, and in fact the few who did talk at length were down in the catalogue as bores and therefore to be avoided. But Antony talked eloquently, interestingly, without strain; with none of those changes of direction, grammatical substitutions, syntactical complexities, whose existence her linguistic lecturer assured her was the real framework of the spoken language. His speech, Jenny decided, was the smooth, reassuring surface of his amatory technique. Even the slight sense of staginess it conveyed worked for him, creating a faintly non-real, therefore non-dangerous, context. But beneath the surface… The obvious survival tactic was to stay afloat. She seized at a bit of driftwood in his last speech.

'Is it important to please your parents?'

'But of course. It's important to please everyone who deserves it, even a little beyond desert if possible. Financially it's not important. My father has a strict scale of values. He gave me the precise amount necessary to bring my grant up to the level he has worked out to be sufficient for my well-being. Less would be neglect; more would be luxury. So I never get more or less for any reason. And to use money as punishment or reward is quite out of the question.'

'He sounds like a Puritan banker.'

'Not at all. If you wish to combine his religion with his profession, you'd have to call him an Aston Villa butcher.