Professor Andersen was in other words attached to his students, and to a much greater extent than they were aware. For he did not associate with them. After his lectures and seminars he shut himself away in his office, and spent his time there. But he was preoccupied with them, and he wasn’t unaffected by associating professionally with so much youthfulness and, in better days, such a potential harvest. But he kept himself at a certain distance, he had always done that, and it had become more and more important to him over the years. But his eyes roved in their direction, and he thought about them often. For one thing, in recent years several students had cropped up who had something unmistakably familiar about them. There were features he recognised, and there were characteristic ways of making gestures, or ways of walking; they were the children of his own fellow students. And then he couldn’t resist asking them whether it wasn’t by any chance the case that such and such was the son of H. S. …, or the daughter of H. Kj …, and if the answer was yes, he felt great satisfaction. Being childless himself, he therefore got a certain pleasure from seeing new students crop up whom he could link directly to his own student days, thirty years ago, and in a way also to his own life, and not least because he was capable of discovering the connection. But occasionally he was wrong. When he posed his question as to whether it wasn’t the case that such and such was the son of U … A, and the person in question didn’t affirm it as he had expected, but replied U … A, who is that? or No, my father’s name is N … B, then he became truly embarrassed, because, by doing this, he had tried to break into the intimate sphere of one of his students, which was how he then perceived it.