Chapter 38 Section VII

There was a musical tinkle ringing in the little house, and the Clements entered with a bottle of French champagne and a bouquet of dahlias. Joan, with dark blue eyes, long eyelashes, and short hair, wore a suit of old black silk that was more fashionable than any other faculty wife in the school could have conceived.It was always a pleasure to see good old bald Tim Pnin leaning down and kissing gently the light hand of Joan, the only one of all the Wendale ladies who knew how to be kissed by a Russian gentleman. How high do you raise your hands.Lawrence, who was getting fatter and wearing a smart gray flannel suit, just sat down in the easy chair, and picked up a book at hand. It turned out to be an English-Russian-Russian-English Pocket Dictionary .He held his spectacles in one hand, looked sideways, tried to think of a few words he'd been trying to look up but couldn't remember now, and looked very much like Johann van Eyck, though younger. That picture shows Father Van der Belle, with his broad jawbones and shaggy hair, the good priest being shown before her by being pointed to a bewildered virgin by an overseer dressed as St. George. A dazed look.It was all there—the brow furrowed, the sad, pensive eyes, the creases on the cheeks, the thin lips, even the wart on the left side of the cheek.

Before the Clements could sit down, Betty opened the door again to let in the gentleman who was interested in bird cakes.Pnin was about to address him as "Professor Win" when Joan - perhaps regretfully - interrupted his introduction, saying, "Oh, we know Thomas! Who doesn't know Tom?" Tim Pnin went back to the kitchen , Betty saluted everyone with Bulgarian cigarettes. "Thomas, I will," Clements said, crossing his fat legs, "you went to Havana to interview those palm tree-climbing fishermen!" "Well, I'm going for the second half of the year," said Dr. Thomas. "Of course, most of the field work has already been done by others."

"Still, it's not bad to get that subsidy bonus, isn't it?" "In our line of business," Thomas replied with a clear conscience, "we've got to do a lot of arduous travel. Really, I'd probably go all the way to the Windward Islands. If," he said with a wry smile, "Senator McCarthy It will be easier if we don't take drastic measures on foreign travel." "He's got a ten-thousand-dollar grant," Joan told Betty, who immediately put on a saluting expression, a peculiar grimace of tensing her chin and lower lip, and nodding slowly, People like Betty can't help showing respect, congratulations when they're having lunch with their bosses, seeing a Who's Who, or meeting a Duchess—a remarkable occasion. And a look of awe.

The Thayers came in a brand new little station wagon and gave the owner a box of nicely wrapped mints.Dr. Hagen had come on foot, holding a bottle of vodka proudly aloft. "Good evening, good evening, good evening," said a cheery Hagen. "Dr. Hagen," Thomas said to him, shaking hands, "I hope the senator hasn't seen you walking up and down the street with that thing in your hand." The good-natured doctor had aged visibly since last year, but was as muscular as ever, with broad shoulders, square jaw, square nostrils, lion-like brows, and brush-like brush-like gray hair. .He wore a black suit, a white nylon shirt, and a black tie with a red lightning bolt.I'm so sorry Mrs. Hagen can't come due to impromptu episodes of her dreadful periodic migraines.

Pnin treats everyone to a cocktail, “or call it a flamingo tail—perhaps more appropriate, especially for ornithologists,” he says wryly. "Thank you!" Mrs. Thayer sang as she took the glass, raising her long eyebrows in a gentle inquiry mingled with surprise, modesty, and pleasure.She was a pretty, well-featured, pink-cheeked woman of forty, with pearly white teeth and wavy golden hair, the out-of-town cousin of the posh and easy-going Joan Clements, who traveled all over the world. All over the world, even Turkey and Egypt, married to the strangest and most unscholarly scholar at Wendell College.A good word should also be said here of Margaret Thayer's husband, Roy, a sentimental and taciturn member of the English Department, which, apart from the fiery dean Cockerell, is a skeptical one. lair.Outwardly, Roy is a garrulous figure.If you draw a portrait of him, first draw a pair of old brown flat shoes, two light beige patches on the elbow, a black pipe, a pair of vesicle eyes under the thick eyebrows, and the rest will be easy to fill in.There's a faint hint of liver disease somewhere in it, eighteenth-century poetry somewhere in the background, which is Roy's specialty, a meadow that's been bitten enough, and a trickling brook and thick bushes. a small grove of trees; the grounds are fenced off on either side by barbed caltrops, and separated from Professor Stowe's domain on one side, where he studied the previous century, where the sheep were whiter and the turf softer. , the creek is much clearer; the other side is separated from Dr. Shapiro's early nineteenth-century domain, where mist hangs over glen valleys, foggy seas, and imported grapes.Roy Thayer, who has always shied away from talking about his profession, indeed any one subject, has wasted a decade of dismal time writing a erudite study of a long-forgotten group of superfluous limericks, and he also used The coded verse keeps a detailed diary that posterity will hopefully one day decipher, look back soberly, and proclaim it the greatest literary achievement of our time—in my own opinion, Roy Thayer, you might do That's right.

While everyone was comfortably drinking and praising the cocktail, Professor Pnin sat down next to his new friend on a puffing lap pad and said: "I am honored that you asked me about the lark, which in Russian is zhavoronok, sir, and I have to report to you about it. Please take this home. I wounded you with a typewriter, A condensed account, with a bibliography. Now I think we may move into the other room, where a la fourchette dinner awaits us!"