Pnin

started upon his rounds up Warren Street and down Spelman Avenue and back again; but no amount of neighbourliness, landscaping, and change-ringing could soften the season; in a fortnight, after a ruminant pause, the academic year would enter its most winterly phase, the Spring Term, and the Clementses felt dejected, apprehensive, and lonely in their nice old draughty house that now seemed to hang about them like the flabby skin and flapping clothes of some fool who had gone and lost a third of his weight. Isabel was so young after all, and so vague, and they really knew nothing about her in-laws beyond that wedding selection of marchpane faces in a hired hall with the vaporous bride so helpless without her glasses.
    The bells, under the enthusiastic direction of Dr Robert Trebler, active member of the Music Department, were still going strong in the angelic sky, and over a frugal breakfast of oranges and lemons Laurence, blondish, baldish, and unwholesomely fat, was criticizing the head of the French Department, one of the people Joan had invited to meet Professor Entwistle of Goldwin University at their house that evening. 'Why on earth,' he fumed, 'did you have to ask that fellow Blorenge, a mummy, a bore, one of the stucco pillars of education?'
    'I like Ann Blorenge,' said Joan, stressing her affirmation and affection with nods. 'A vulgar old cat!' cried Laurence. 'A pathetic old cat,' murmured Joan - and it was then that Dr Trebler stopped and the hallway telephone took over.
    Technically speaking, the narrator's art of integrating telephone conversations still lags far behind that of rendering dialogues conducted from room to room, or from window to window across some narrow blue alley in an ancient town with water so precious, and the misery of donkeys, and rugs for sale, and minarets, and foreigners and melons, and the vibrant morning echoes. When Joan, in her brisk long-limbed way, got to the compelling instrument before it gave up, and said hullo (eyebrows up, eyes roaming), a hollow quiet greeted her; all she could hear was the informal sound of a steady breathing; presently the breather's voice said, with a cosy foreign accent: 'One moment, excuse me' - this was quite casual, and he continued to breathe and perhaps hem and hum or even sigh a lime to the accompaniment of a crepitation that evoked the turning over of small pages.
    'Hullo!' she repeated.
    'You are,' suggested the voice warily, 'Mrs Fire?'
    'No,' said Joan, and hung up. 'And besides,' she went on, swinging back into the kitchen and addressing her husband who was sampling the bacon she had prepared for herself, 'you cannot deny that Jack Cockerell considers Blorenge to be a first-rate administrator.'
    'What was that telephone call?'
    'Somebody wanting Mrs Feuer or Fayer. Look here, if you deliberately neglect everything George -' [Dr O.G. Helm, their family doctor].
    'Joan,' said Laurence, who felt much better after that opalescent rasher, 'Joan, my dear, you are aware aren't you, that you told Margaret Thayer yesterday you wanted a roomer?'
    'Oh, gosh,' said Joan - and obligingly the telephone rang again.
    'It is evident,' said the same voice, comfortably resuming the conversation, 'that I employed by mistake the name of the informer. I am connected with Mrs Clement?'
    'Yes, this is Mrs Clements,' said Joan.
    'Here speaks Professor -' There followed a preposterous little explosion. 'I conduct the classes in Russian. Mrs Fire, who is now working at the library part-time -'
    'Yes - Mrs Thayer, I know. Well, do you want to see that room?'
    He did. Could he come to inspect it in approximately half an hour? Yes, she would be in. Untenderly she cradled the receiver.
    'What was it this time?' asked her husband, looking back, pudgy freckled hand on banister, on his way upstairs to the security of his study.
    'A cracked ping-pong ball, Russian.'
    'Professor Pnin, by God!' cried Laurence. "'I know him well: he is the brooch - " Well, I flatly refuse to have that freak in my house.'
    He trudged up, truculently. She called after him:
    'Lore, did you finish writing that article last night?'
    'Almost.' He had turned the corner of the stairs - she heard his hand squeaking on the banisters, then striking them. 'I will today. First I have that damned EOS examination to prepare.'
    This stood for the Evolution of Sense, his greatest course (with an enrolment of twelve, none even remotely apostolic) which had opened and would close with the phrase destined to be