I think of Professor Cosmatou and envisage a younger version, narrow and sharp-angled. When Stella arrives, she is more like a furious Degas imp with hair suffering from explosive decompression. We argue immediately over the names I have given to various mathematical operations whose proper designations I did not discover until afterwards. Moon numbers and angel numbers are just the beginning. She calls me a hick. I call her a cow. The atmosphere over Professor Cosmatou’s dinner table is shocking. The professor’s husband, the famous Peloponnesian philosopher of meaning whose parents saw fit to call him Cosmas Cosmatos, withdraws with his plate to the study and commences to watch professional women’s beach volleyball on satellite television, in which his wife shortly joins him. They are both quite genuine fans of this sophisticated sport, but would not usually abandon the table for it.