After breakfast, he insisted on walking her over to Phillips, to the very door of Mr. Starling’s amphitheater—and then he stood there smiling at her until she turned her back to climb up the amphitheater stairs to the top, where she sat. When she took her seat and looked down—he was still standing there, smiling. Then he gave her a little wave that halfway resembled a salute. To top it off, he mouthed, in a heavy, overripe mime, the words :::::I:::::LOVE:::::YOU:::::HONEY::::: Charlotte was embarrassed to the core—what if somebody saw that?—but she felt obliged to give him at least a nod and a little white smile, which she did, and he still stood there—so she looked down at the desk arm of her chair, as if studying something with maximum concentration. Why couldn’t he leave, like a normal person? Practically all the students in the class were juniors and seniors, and she didn’t know any of them, except for Jill, her seatmate, and she barely knew Jill—nevertheless she was glad Jill hadn’t arrived and wasn’t witnessing Adam mooning over her like this—and there were definitely some cashmere types in this class, and she could just hear them saying, “So now the country bumpkin is banging a loser, a nobody, an independent…She definitely makes the rounds”—and above all she could hear the sniggers sniggers sniggers sniggers…She lifted her eyes as covertly as she could, which is to say, without lifting her head…Thank God! No Adam; he had finally left. But why the “Thank God”?

“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.”

It was Mr. Starling, at the lectern. He was wearing a tweed jacket that would have looked almost gaudy if the amphitheater’s stage lighting hadn’t brought out its colors so richly—orange, yellow, chocolate brown, luggage brown, and a certain light blue that sang harmony and brought them all alive…perfectly, in Charlotte Simmons’s eyes…Yet another stab of guilt and regret…She could have been so close to this man…and his pioneering in humankind’s understanding of itself…in the new matrix, as Adam would have it, except that Mr. Starling had already created a matrix, for real, not in dreams…and she could now be living on the very frontier of the life of the mind. He had given her her chance.

Her heart sank. Any day now, the final grades for the first semester would be out, and Momma and Miss Pennington would finally…find out…and she, the little mountain prodigy, could not think of any way to give them a little white forewarning that would soften the blow.

In his peripatetic, Socratic fashion, Mr. Starling was moving about the stage, lit up so resplendently by the lights overhead, talking about the origins of the concept of “sociobiology,” developed by a zoologist from Alabama named Edward O. Wilson. Wilson’s specialty had always been ants—ants and the complex social order and divisions of labor within ant colonies. He had been a newly minted Ph.D., a young assistant professor teaching at Harvard, when he went to an island in the Caribbean known as “Monkey Island” to help his first graduate student launch a study of macaque rhesus monkeys in their natural habitat. They talked about certain similarities—despite the enormous differences in size, strength, and intelligence—between ants and apes.

“And Wilson experienced what every research scientist lives for,” said Mr. Starling, “the Aha! phenomenon, that flash of synthesis that will revolutionize the field. If there were similarities—analogies—between the social lives of ants and apes, why wouldn’t Homo sapiens be part of the same picture? The analogies came flooding to his mind.” Mr. Starling paused, then looked about the amphitheater with a mischievous smile. “But just as Nature abhors a vacuum, Science abhors analogies. Analogies are regarded as superficial, as ‘literary,’ which to the scientific mind—and certainly to Wilson’s—means impressionistic. Now…since Science abhors analogies, just how did Wilson go about showing that from ants to humans the social life of all animals was similar—and more than similar, in fact, since in all animals it was part of a single biological system?” Mr. Starling scanned the hundred and fifty students before him. “Who will be so kind as to provide us with the answer?”

Charlotte, like so many others, craned this way and that to see if any hands were up. She herself didn’t have the faintest idea. She had scarcely even looked at Wilson’s book, which was called Sociobiology: The New Synthesis—not A New Synthesis, but capital-T The New Synthesis. How could she have, given all she had been through for the past two months? So many students were craning about in their desk chairs to see if any brave soul was going to tackle that one, their chairs made a creaking, shuffling choral sound.

A hand went up barely three feet away from Charlotte…a girl two rows directly ahead of her. Long, straight light brown hair she had brushed until it absolutely shone. Oh, Charlotte knew about such things.

Mr. Starling gazed upward. His line of vision was such that Charlotte could have sworn he was looking straight at her…but of course he wasn’t. He pointed, and it was as if he were pointing straight at her.

“Yes?”

The girl with the shining light brown hair said, “He used allometry? If that’s the way you pronounce it? In all my born days”—bawn days—“I never heard a living soul say that word out loud.”

Laughter and chuckles all around. All miii bawn days. Countless faces were smiling at her. She had not only a Southern accent but a quite coy, little-ol’-me Southern accent.

“Would you define allometry for us?”

“I’ll certainly try.” I-i-i-i’ll sutney try-y-y-y. Appreciative chuckles. “Allometry…allometry is the study of the relative growth of a part of an organism in relation to the growth of the whole. It’s a really—what’s the expression—bangin’ way to describe morphological evolution…is the way Iiiii’d put it.”

Renewed laughter, wholly with her! Such learned, esoteric material pouring forth in a flirtatious, Savannah deb-party Southern accent! This Dixie chick knew what she was doing!

“Very good,” said Mr. Starling. He had a big smile of his own. “And perhaps you can tell us why this allometry was so useful to Wilson.”

“Well,” said the girl, “it’s like this new dance?” Laughter, laughter, before she could even name the dance. “Allometry enabled Mr. Wilson to like…do the submarine?” Laughter, laughter, laughter. “He went down…under the anecdotal level, the surface level?…and found mathematically corroborant first principles?”—fuhst principles—“and that way he doesn’t”—dud’n—“have to say an ant is like a human being or that a…a…I don’t know…a baboon is like a sea slug?—because he can show that behavior at that evolutionary level is demonstrably—or I reckon I should say allometrically?—the same as behavior at this evolutionary level…seems like to me.”

Laughter, laughter, laughter, even scattered applause—and some boy shouted out, “You go, girl!” Another round of laughter—and then all eyes turned to Mr. Starling to get his reaction.

He was smiling right at the girl—and right in the direction of Charlotte. “Thank you,” he said. A pause, during which he continued to smile at his new discovery, the Savannah-drawling, flirtatious little prodigy. “Seems to me,” he said, “absolutely correct.” Laughter, laughter. He gazed out on the entire class. “Science abhors analogies. But science loves—or accepts—allometry, even when it finds its equations insoluble. But that problem needn’t detain us.” Then he turned back to his little star comedienne, smiled at her once more. “Thank you.”

As it beamed up, the smile had hit Charlotte Simmons, too…and gone right through her. His former star, the one with the hillbilly Southern accent, was no longer even there. It was as if God had devised a little skit to show Charlotte Simmons how far she had fallen…replaced by another Southern girl, who had materialized right in front of her…same size, same long, straight, shining light brown hair…astounding the class with her brilliance…in a Southern accent…from the sophisticated coastal lowlands. Why hadn’t Charlotte Simmons done the same reading? Why hadn’t she kept up? Why hadn’t she found time to think about these things…and have a life of the mind? She knew she shouldn’t dwell on the answer. She couldn’t afford to lapse back into tears. Adam was right. Tears, all tears, starting at the moment of birth, were cries for protection. But she didn’t want to dwell upon Adam and the matrical dialogues of the Millennial Mutants, either.