On August 7, 1994, she had to break off an online chat to leave for work. “And I had one more question for her,” Greg recalled. “She asked what it was. And I asked her plain and simple, ‘Will you marry me?’ There was a pause of about thirty seconds, and she asked me if I was serious. I said, ‘Yes, never more so,’ and she said ‘Yes.’” Sue let her mother and a sister in on what was happening. She told certain friends, too, but not her brother and father. “It’s just going to be incomprehensible to them,” Greg told me, “that this could happen over a chunk of cable. Add to that I’m stealing away their last child, not just out of the home, or the state, but out of the country, and I can understand why her father is not going to understand.” The same shocks would presumably await Greg’s mum and dad. “I think it’s more the medium than anything else. It’s way new to them, but for me it’s just part of the way we do things now. *Grin*. Mum’s department just got Lotus’ cc:Mail,[7.6] and she was telling me about it and I was like ‘Yeah, so?’ but she was really excited about it.” Although Greg did talk to Sue from home, not just his university, he could do so without his parents knowing, because of the late hours he keeps, and because he lived in a converted shed out back of his house. I pondered the ironies here. Suddenly the Internet held out a new peril for parents. Having fretted about electronic pornography, Mom and Dad could now worry about children with more noble but equally secret activities. Parents might erase porno from a hard drive; it was not so easy to wipe out love as sincere and intense as Greg and Sue’s. But had the two actually _talked_, telephone style, over a real phone? “We’ve had a grand total of one phone call,” Greg told me. Sue dialed him up. He said she’d kept putting it off because she was scared. “I know, I know,” he wrote, “we should talk more but I’m just a poor student.” Greg inserted the computer symbol for a smile to show he was kidding. “The one thing that surprised me about that call was how naturally the conversation flowed. I think it came from the fact that we are friends first and a couple second—that the pressure of the relationship was negated by the fact that we are such good friends. I seem to recall impressions more than anything else, like the lilt of her laugh, the timbre of her voice, the accent. We just talked about stuff—us, love, Clinton’s screwups in Congress, sports, everything. Very tough to put the phone down.” “Still,” I asked Sue by telephone, “won’t it be quite a transition from the American Midwest to Australia?”