I
The sharing or exchanging of intimate thoughts and feelings, especially when the exchange is on a mental or spiritual level.
She opened the door into a dark auditorium.
Heads turned.
She was late. She had received a National Science Foundation award and had read an abstract of her paper on the behavior of biological organisms. At one point she mispronounced: orgasms. She left in mortification after getting her certificate. She fled into the nearest open classroom to hide her shame. She needed a break from science, she decided.
This was different. He was different. In the dark auditorium she sat transfixed. It was a revolution and it exploded before her in a flash of light in her mind in that darkened auditorium. He was a revolutionary and they, idea and man, obliterated all that she had come to accept, unquestioning, as reality. She could never go back to the science that had been normal to her. And she never did.
...
The young man was seated nearer the front to her right when she entered, his was one of many heads that had turned. When the lecture ended and the auditorium was illuminated again, she got up to leave and the young man got up to leave. He turned, as all heads turned then, towards the exit. He caught a glimpse of her going through the doors. "Long, shapely legs". He couldn't help himself. He had not been looking for her, nor thinking about her, nor what her legs might be like, but she was there and her legs were long and shapely and he was a 22-year old he and she of the long shapely legs was a she. But he did not hurry after her. Thomas S. Kuhn's lecture had exploded in his mind also and it contained but one thought, the new structure of science .Until he saw the long, shapely legs. Then they were in his mind, too. He couldn't help it. But they were out of his mind by the time he got to the door. But then they were there again.
The foyer was crowded with attendees, all talking, dazed as if zombies, in small groups and were leaving, more or less, aimlessly, and now he was standing next to her.They were not on his mind, the legs, they were there, they just were, it was hard physical fact but it was in spite of the legs rather than because of them that he said to her, who he had never seen before, "You were late." It was awkward. "Better late than never. It was just what I needed" was her reply, which mooted the young man's dawning awareness of awkwardness. For there was a communion of the mind right then and there. They had each experienced the revolution individually and now, the tall, handsome young man realized, they shared this revolution. It meant the same thing to her as it did to him and there was no going back, not for her, not for him, not for them. And they never did.
