- In Clarissa Vaughan's apartment in New York City, Clarissa's daughter Julia spends a moment feeling glum on Louis Waters's behalf. After the moment passes, she becomes her cheerful self again.
- Julia tells her mother that she's come to pick up the backpack that she left behind on the previous day. She also informs Clarissa that she's going to go shopping with her professor, the queer theorist, Mary Krull.
- When Clarissa realizes that Mary Krull is waiting downstairs, she tells Julia that Mary should come up and say hello. Julia goes down to get her, and soon the famed theorist appears.
- As Clarissa and Mary take each other in (not for the first time), each of them thinks about how little she likes the other. They make small talk, and although Mary does her best to be polite and charming, Clarissa knows perfectly well that Mary thinks of her as unacceptably bourgeois and quaint.
- For her part, Clarissa thinks that Mary's radical gender politics and inflamed sense of moral superiority make her "just as bad as most men, just that aggressive, just that self-aggrandizing" (14.58).
- As Julia and Mary get ready to leave, Clarissa wonders once again why her straight daughter is so interested in a woman like Mary Krull.
- Whatever Julia's reasons are for hanging around with Mary, it's perfectly clear why Mary hangs around with her. As they leave, Mary follows Julia patriotically, "as if Julia were the distant country in which Mary was born and from which she has been expelled" (14.66).