Erudite

Learned; scholarly

Dr. Burt Haber sat holding his hands over his face and peered through the thin spaces between his fingers at Stephanie, a sophomore who had come to ask a question about the Vena Cava for her Intro to Bio test the next day. Unfortunately for both of them, Stephanie had come at a bad time. Just minutes before his office hours began Professor Haber, expert on a species of worm that only breeds in the dark and lives off the heat of other worms, had been told that his wife, a professor of Germanic languages and literature, had been caught in her office with a grad student's head buried in her crouch while she stood reading an obscure translation of Rilke.
"Do you know how a spider's lungs work, Susie?" Dr. Haber demanded, his mouth covered by his hands.
"It's Stephanie," she said.
Haber folded his hands, nodded, and made a tisking noise as if he was slowly coming to terms with his mistake. He hung his head below his folded hands and inhaled very loudly so the oxygen raked against his nasal passage. Then, after a completely silent moment, he grabbed a book from his cluttered desk and frantically thrust the book into Stephanie's face. She leaned back, a little scared.
"You didn't answer my intial question. Do you know how spider lungs work?"
"Nuh-no I d---"
"Like this," he hissed, and, lifting his left leg up on the desk so he could lean further forward and show her, he slowly turned the book sideways so the pages fell one after another in a cascade of inert squares.
"Did you know that?" he asked, his eyes wide.
"No," she paused, "but I do now."
Then he put the book down and slid his legs around and sat cross-legged on his desk, knocking some stray papers to the floor. He leaned forward and asked her,
"Can I be honest with you, Stephanie?"
"Okay," she said.
"That's the the most intelligent thing I've ever heard."