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"So you decided in class that I was going to be the mother of your children?"
"Theresa," said John Paul, "we're both at prime reproductive age. We both size up everyone we see as potential reproductive partners."
"Maybe I sized you up differently from the way you sized me up."
"I know you did," said John Paul. "But my endeavor for the next while is to make myself irresistible to you."
"Didn't it occur to you that saying it right out loud would be extremely off-putting?"
"Come on," said John Paul. "You knew what I was about from the start. What would I accomplish by pretending?"
"Maybe I want to be courted a little. I have all the needs of an ordinary human female."
"Excuse me," said John Paul, "but some women would think that I was making a pretty damn good start at courting you. You get really bad news, you have a bad phone conversation, you cry in your office, and when you come out, here I am, with comfort food that you know I've gone to a lot of trouble to prepare for you, without your asking--and I tell you that I love you and my intention is to be your partner in science, politics, and family-making. I think that's damned romantic."
"Well, yes. But something's still missing."
"I know. I was waiting for just the right moment to tell you how much I want to take that ridiculous sweater off of you. I thought I'd wait, though, until you wanted me to do it so badly that you almost couldn't stand it."
She found herself laughing and blushing. "It'll be a long time before that happens, buster."
"As long as it takes. I'm a Polish Catholic boy. The kind of girl we marry is the kind that doesn't give you the milk until you buy the cow."
"That's such an attractive analogy."
"What about 'Eggs until you buy the chicken'?"
"Try 'Bacon until you buy the pig'?"
"Ouch," he said. "But if you insist, I'll try to think of you in porcine terms."
"You're not going to kiss me tonight."
"Who'd want to? You have salad in your teeth."
"I'm too emotionally on edge to make any kind of rational decision right now."
"I was counting on that."
"And here's a thought," she said. "What if this is their plan?"
"Whose plan?"
"Them. The same them we've been talking about. What if the reason they didn't send you back to Poland is because they wanted you to marry a really smart girl--maybe the daughter of the world's leading military theoretician. Of course, they couldn't be sure you'd end up in my section of Human Community."
"Yes, they could," he said thoughtfully.
"Ah," she said. "So you didn't want my section."
He stared at the remnants of the food. "What an interesting idea. We might be somebody's idea of a eugenics program."
"Ever since co-ed colleges began," she said, "it's been a marriage market for people with money to meet and marry people with brains."
"And vice versa."
"But sometimes two people with brains get together."
"And when they have babies, watch out."
