Incongruously, he was dressed in a black overcoat open to show a black suit and tie, a white dress shirt, and low black-leather shoes. With white hair and a trim gray-streaked beard, would he appear forty-five to an objective observer? Maybe a vigorous fifty-five? Even in the University setting, he had never looked like an intellectual to her. But it was one hell of a lot easier to think him an intellectual than a seventy-year-old. None of the recent students at his retirement party could believe it, but he was about to be professor emeritus of philosophy. It didn't seem to change him much, though. Few things did. Not even their chance meeting at a party for the sexually liberated in her senior year had changed his behavior towards her. It hadn't even changed her grade. She pushed herself to catch up. "Prof," she said when she had, "I didn't think that you believed in magic." He was notoriously skeptical about bent keys, pyramid power, and the discovery that every atom in the universe was in instant communication with every other atom.
