Reclining on the living room sofa with another glass of the Shiraz that she permitted herself on weekends only, she caught herself thinking, with increasing frequency (and with an urgency that she found, admittedly, somewhat puzzling), that her girlhood, at any rate, had approached something like perfection. Before retiring, her parents had both been distinguished professors at Upper Canada University. And. in fact, it was something of a Departmental witticism—one that Arden found more than a little irksome—that her office at Rowell College, although spacious and bright, was not quite as choice as the one that her mother had inhabited, for nearly forty years, in the coveted left turret of Old Mary.
