She could imagine him having asked her how she supported herself and her child financially. This question would have forced her to explain how she had considered all prostitution that every human did in life and had chosen the physical version to be the most honorable. It would have brought her such sadistic pleasure to watch him squirm around in iconoclastic ideas the way a convict had to adapt to prison or a mouth to the wiggling substance of hideous tasting Jello. Fortunately for both of them, he did not ask. She got up from her seat thinking how ignorant he was of the earliest essays and arguments about education. Even centuries ago intellectuals believed that education should not be indoctrination or to learn a practical skill, but exposure to important ideas that would help to guide an individual's perceptions. "Well, Mr. Quest, it's been a pleasure," she said as she shook his hand. "Just remember that if you soften Recla's approach toward Nathaniel I can't exactly guarantee what he will say to her at all times but I can guarantee that the vowels and syllables he uses will be benign. They will be creative and not hateful. Please talk to this easily offended teacher and remind her not to put him in with the coats anymore. That is if she wants to not deal with me in any other way than with a smile on my face and cheese and crackers in my hands." Chapter Twenty-Two He had assumed the continuum of excitement in the exotic anomaly of living together with a man. In the first month of living with Seong Seob he believed (as much as his ruminations allowed) that a union with a man would be perennial splendor. Back then he thought it would be more emotionally and intellectually superior to what his parents felt toward each other. There would be no transfer of a wife's affections to the children; and not having shared property, lackadaisical rose, shrub, and tree plantings and the conversations thereof would not bury him alive in a landslide of the mundane. One night in particular Sang Huin was bored with love making toward his friend. Love was yearning for what one lacked and now, with all this time of having him, he could not sense that wish to possess what he had months earlier obtained. And yet like all other times they nonetheless climaxed to sleep the way one might eat some leftover pie to wash a pan. Somewhere into 2:00 in the morning the ghost of his sister, Jun Jin, eclipsed over his brain and he woke in the shadow and heat of its passing. He was thinking of her progressively less all the time. Indeed, she was passing into a realm no different than nameless, traceless ancestors diffusing out and away like the molecules that once composed a mist. But still she did not go easily. If not clasping onto him chokingly as one who, dead, was nonetheless drowning, she would slam him against the internal walls of his brain for trying to relegate her into oblivion. She would definitely not go easily.