Free An Imperfect Spy by Amanda Cross

point, I really do.”
    “It isn’t alone what you teach,” Abbott said. “It’s what the students seem to expect these days. They don’t come to learn, they come to argue before they know what they’re arguing about. They know how to challenge but not how to acquire the information that gives them the right to challenge. Very old-fashioned, isn’t it?”
    “No,” Kate said, rather liking him. “It’s gone too far, I do see that. Even in literary studies, many students don’t want to study texts or, as we used to say, literature, they want to discuss the social, cultural, gender, and economic conditions surrounding and infusing the text. One can’t help feeling annoyed with this shift in emphasis from time to time, but I tend to look on it as an extreme but necessary inter-generational adjustment.”
    “That’s put magnanimously,” Abbott said. “But why did this extreme adjustment just happen lately? Generations of students studied law as it was taught, and they probably studied literature that way, too. Why need we change so dramatically? Are you sure you wouldn’t like another drink?”
    “Well, I might get some more tonic,” Kate said, moving toward the bar.
    “Allow me,” Abbott said; he took her glass. “I’ll be right back; don’t move. Just plain tonic?”
    “Please,” Kate said. His gallantry allowed her a moment to structure her response, for which she was grateful.
    “I’ve been thinking of what you asked,” she saidwhen he had returned with their glasses refilled. “I don’t think revolutions come gradually, or in measured steps, and we are living in a revolution. There are two possible faculty responses to revolutions: to fight them, and to join them, hoping in the process perhaps to offer not only encouragement, but some restraint and caution. The problem I have found—I speak frankly, and only about literature—is that caution is misplaced, because those in power, those who like the old ways, will not budge until pushed. And once you push, the momentum carries you even further than you had quite foreseen.”
    “Yes,” Abbott said, “I’ve noticed that. That’s why I’m against the pushers. I’m ready to stand and defend what we have. After all, it took many years of effort to achieve what we have, in law and literature, and surely it’s worth respect.”
    “Except for the fact that it is white men who have achieved it, and told some lies and committed some crimes in the process. Since we now know that, we revolutionaries feel inclined to question everything, perhaps more than we should.”
    “You want to throw out the baby with the bathwater?”
    “No,” Kate said. “I think we just want to reconsider the baby and change the bathwater. But clichés are hard to build on, don’t you find?”
    “Clichés, perhaps. Wisdom, I find, is not hard to build on.” He had returned to his pomposity, and was looking over her shoulder. Kate turned to find Blair approaching with yet another faculty member in tow. “Let me introduce you to Augustus Slade,”he said to Kate. “Kate Fansler is teaching the law and literature course with me,” Blair told Slade, unnecessarily. More informatively, and sensing her need to distinguish these men one from the other, he said to Kate: “Professor Slade teaches Criminal Law.” Kate greeted Slade with more enthusiasm than she felt; one could have too many conversations with members of this exalted faculty. She wondered, irrelevantly, if Harriet had decided to attend this sad example of a social whirl. Apparently not; wise Harriet.
    Kate repressed a sigh. When caught, as she now was, in a reception or cocktail party, Kate thought of Shaw’s response when asked to stand for Parliament: “It would be easier and pleasanter to drown myself,” he had replied. But Professor Slade was, clearly, ready like the others to let her know she had no business here at a law school. What Slade did not realize was that Kate had decided upon him as the