Joselyn marched briskly down the hall, her smile frozen, hard on her face. She was less than pleased with the outcome of her interview with Dr. Bertrand. Oh, she had gotten an offer of an assistantship with the famous man, all right, but in so doing he had shown her a side of himself that she didn't like. And she'd thought that Paul was a weakling! Bertrand was easily as much of a wimp under all the bravado, the sturdy reputation. She wondered, offhandedly, if the pregnant secretary had been whimpered and whined into sharing his bed, if she'd grown so sick of hearing him blubber that she'd finally said "Yes"? One thing was sure, though. She knew she could never respect a man who had lowered himself as the professor had done.

Even as she was thinking these thoughts, deep down, she knew that there was something fundamentally wrong with her logic. She wanted her men to assert themselves, their needs, but when they tried to she felt compelled to cut them down, to degrade them. She wanted to be the passive party, but she would not let herself submit. The very idea was highly repugnant to her. Her own mother had been a classic example of the spineless, dominated female. Her father tyrannically ran every moment of her mother's life, humiliating her in public and private, until the final humiliation, until he decided he wanted a younger woman and divorced her.