Free Poetic Justice by Amanda Cross

these, of course, were quietly persuaded by Cudlipp that it takes a …”
    “Conceited, arrogant, insensitive bastard to win this fight,” McQuire happily concluded. “Forgive me finishing all your sentences, Frogmore, but they all have such provocative beginnings.”
    “Which explains, I guess,” Kate said, “why you want someone in the English Department on your side at the meeting Monday. Let’s think about the English Department a moment, may we, if you can bear it?”
    “That, Kate, is what I hoped you would say,” Frogmore said, leaning toward her. “McQuire here can probably handle the Economics Department, but they will only give a certain amount of trouble—economists today, except for Bill, aren’t really interested in undergraduate education—but if we can’t do a little something in your department, Kate, we might as well turn in our badges. What will you drink?”
    “Beer,” Kate said. “It will remind me of how pleasant the park was this morning. O.K. We have Cartier committed to the University College, and also, if I may put order before modesty, you have me. Opposed to the University College you have Cudlipp, Clemance,O’Toole. But O’Toole as Dean will be off the College faculty. It’s scarcely worth the price to us since he will be leading the fight in the main arena, but the odds on our side are small enough so that every advantage counts. From the rest of the Department we have the chairman, Michaels, who is, I would say, so fed up with Cudlipp and Clemance going over his head to the Acting President that he would probably welcome, in a properly decorous way, any plan which gave him some weight against those two. Everglade, the Secretary of the Department, is absolutely the sweetest guy in the world, but I don’t really know what corner he’ll be in. Probably ours. We have then Professor Peter Packer Pollinger, who is perfectly capable of voting on either side when it comes right down to it, depending on what he imagines Fiona Macleod would have done under similar circumstances, but as a matter of fact he dislikes Clemance so much for once having said that Fiona Macleod was a silly poetess whose rhymes were not improved by the fact that she was really a man that Professor Pollinger may vote with us if he remembers what it was Clemance said on the day he happens to vote.”
    “Kate, dear,” McQuire interrupted, “I do hope you know what you’re talking about. Frogmore and I aren’t going to ask you to explain why a lady poet should be a man, but you might just assure us that you aren’t, shall we say, rambling?”
    “I assure you. The one who rambles is Peter Packer Pollinger. All right, then we have Chaucer, Medieval English, Comparative Medieval, Renaissance, Seventeenth Century, Eighteenth Century, Shakespeare. I don’t know where any of them stands (I mention the fieldsrather than the names for the moment to give you the scope of the problem) but the older the field, the more conservative the views, as a general rule. The only trouble with that is that I’m not certain what they’ll consider the conservative position in this case. Of the two people in the contemporary field, one is Plimsole, who is a College man and lost, I fear, to us, but he is so unbelievably longwinded that I can’t believe even the College will consider him altogether an asset, though he’s not a bad fellow if he could learn to stop talking when he gets to the end of what he wants to say. The other contemporary person is Emilia Airhart.”
    “You must be putting us on. I never heard of her, I mean not as a member of the English Department. You aren’t suggesting she made it out of the Oriental waters only to pop up here in a new life.”
    “I hadn’t realized, really, what an odd lot we were. Emilia’s little known because she never turns up anywhere except to see students, whom she likes, and to write plays, which keep getting put on off-Broadway, but they are so very with it that no one in