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Picasso’s blue period,” they might concede, “but what about his rose period? Practically zilch!”
    Only two doors opened on the left side of the hall. A person could enter the first and turn left again into the nursery—so called because eight of the most junior staff members shared the six desks shoehorned into that narrow office—or veer right into Sandy’s office. A two-sided mail rack with pigeonholes for each departmental member jutted out into her office. Beyond the mail rack, doors led into two smaller offices, and a third door gave onto the hall again.
    The decor was late government surplus: nothing matched. Tables, chairs, desks, file cabinets—almost everything had been scrounged over the years. Whenever a more favored department got new furnishings, Piers Leyden’s friends in Buildings and Grounds would let someone from Art salvage such desirable objects as desks with unbroken drawers, chairs that still swiveled or better desk lamps. Other offices had carpets and matching draperies. Art’s floor and windows were bare, and the chairman’s telephone was a simple black extension of Sandy’s—there was no way to put someone on hold, no push buttons to route in extra calls.
    All this was not a deliberate shortchanging on Administration’s part. Not entirely. By a sort of unspoken agreement Art balanced its unyielding attitude toward Administration’s officiousness by not clamoring for more amenities. Most members of the department were happy to relinquish bigger offices and fancier furnishings in return for their relative independence.
    With Mike Szabo trailing her like a shaggy brown dog, Sandy entered this shabby warren of offices by the first door, lifted a cup from the tray he still carried and stepped aside to let the Hungarian pass through to the main office.
    “You can just set the tray on the bookcase,” she called after him. “The broken chair’s that one on the other side of the encyclopedias.”
    “Hokay,” replied Szabo, who’d given Professor Simpson a cheerful salute in passing.
    Sandy smiled at the gray-haired professor also and set the cup marked C/W/SUG on his desk in the front corner of the nursery.
    Juniors were usually stuck with the early morning or late-afternoon schedules; they rarely got the desirable midday classes, so the room was empty now except for Professor Simpson. He looked up from a thick tome as Sandy placed his coffee on a desk cluttered by student themes, IBM grade cards, folders, and stacks of books with scrap paper markers fringing their ends.
    Albert Simpson had once carried much weight on a large frame. The weight was gone now, and his boniness made him look older, as if he’d shrunk into himself. He seemed to embody the idea of the absentminded professor whose suits were always untidy, whose socks might not match, and who forgot contemporary dates, but who could make dead eras come alive with thousands of intimate details. The elderly classicist had been working on his book about Roman art for almost thirty years, yet it had never progressed beyond the research stage. He kept wandering down too many fascinating side paths ever to organize his mass of findings into a publishable manuscript; but he was David Wade’s graduate advisor, and Sandy was fond of him, so she defended him whenever Professor Quinn or Piers Leyden made caustic remarks about eggs that never hatched.
    “Is David in this morning?” Simpson asked now, peering over his glasses at an outdated schedule taped to the wall above his desk. “I’ve just come across another passage in Maiuri that supports his thesis.”
    “No, he’s taking in that exhibition at the Metropolitan,” Sandy said. She made a mental note to replace the three-year-old schedule with a new one, and this time she’d tape it up herself instead of just handing it to him to get lost on his desk again. “He should be in around noon, though.”
    “Good, good,” murmured the old scholar, already reabsorbed in his