Beth applied within for a witty response but came up blank. She was not used to playing with conversation—she was barely used to conversation at all. Unless a person was speaking about birds, or pointing to birds, or asking her to please tell them all the fascinating details she knew about birds, she generally avoided engaging. Moreover, inherent shyness, mixed with her attending university from a prodigiously young age, had not been conducive to her developing social skills. Even in Oxford’s ornithology department, as a female professor of twenty-four among predominantly old men, she seldom
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