In the midst of the dance, the Cow became aware of a Third Party. A woman. Staring with undisguised hostility at her. It was no one the Cow recognised, but since her glasses had long lain broken, this was not necessarily meaningful. The Cow paused, momentarily. Dr Shades, meanwhile, had noticed the newcomer too. He fell swiftly into displacement behaviour.
"This is the Carnivorous Cow," he explained to the newcomer. "She works with me, up on Campus. We often bump into each other at the coffee outlet, and recently we've been bumping into each other at the gym quite a bit, too." His tone became increasingly defensive as he continued. He turned to the Cow. "And this is Barbie." Just that. And then, with Barbie still glaring fiercely, Dr Shades crumpled into a subdued heap and beat a hasty retreat into the gym.
The Cow was so startled that she quite forgot about the 20 year old who tried to chat her up earlier, or the inadequacy of the air conditioning, or even the horrors of the women's changeroom. She hauled out her hellphone and started to text Gramsci about Dr Shades.
"Who was it?" enquired Gramsci. "His wife, perhaps?"
"Nope," replied the Cow, who'd met his wife. Recently enough to know that she was still his wife. Nor did anything in the longwinded introduction - of her - suggest any professional connection. Unlikely a student, either. To old for offspring, to proprietorial for an acquaintance. "His girlfriend?" ventured Gramsci.
Dr Shades has a girlfriend? the Cow wondered. Her mind wandered back to the discussion in the Sagan book about hamsters. Females preferred winners, it was clear. So why would Dr Shades - who always came off second best in the hierarchy battles with the Cow - be pulling girls?
And then she remembered her earlier conversation with Mr Timberland, about Prof Truffle who despite having the personality of hungover rhinoceros and the looks of its ugly brother, had an attractive young girlfriend. Pheromones, they'd decided - in the same way that sows go for truffles in the mistaken belief that they're sexy hot males, so Prof Truffle was emitting chemical signals that belied his true being and entranced his young girlfriend. Male sweat was, after all, the human vehicle of this same pheromone. And most male armpits were littered at women's nose height.
Perhaps Dr Shades trips to the gym were an attempt to generate a little more of the trigger pheromone, if only through the generation of copious quantities of its carrier fluid?