The evening unleashed an icy downpour upon London, turning the pavements into black mirrors that reflected the flickering lights of street lamps and the blurry silhouettes of hurrying passers-by. Inside the café, tucked between two antiquarian bookshops in Bloomsbury, there was another world. The dense air, steeped in the aroma of freshly ground Arabica beans and damp wool, seemed to echo the record on the gramophone, which poured forth the unhurried variations of master Pachelbel's Canon. The faint light of brass wall sconces with frosted shades caught, out of the gloom, heaps of books on oak tables, the scuffed leather upholstery along the wall, and the layered shadows gathering in the corners.

It grew so warm that you praised yourself for the thousandth time for having relieved your smartphone of the right to intrude upon you that evening.

Professor Atticus Wilson leaned back in his deep armchair. His long legs, clad in neatly worn woollen trousers, were stretched out carelessly before him. The light falling on the man from above traced his high cheekbones and sharp jawline, marked by a pale scar (the origin of which he preferred to leave unspoken), and slid across strands of red hair, glinting like the embers of a dying fire. He removed his steel-rimmed glasses and polished the lenses with the corner of a knitted jumper, inadvertently revealing the immaculate white edge of a starched shirt beneath. His long fingers—perpetually marked with smudges of blue ink, no matter how often he washed his hands—turned the pages of a battered volume of Homer resting on his knees. On the low table of dark wood stood an almost-empty cup where the dregs of strong coffee still remained.

You sat opposite, clutching the cup to your chest, its life-giving warmth seeping through your jumper. Your gaze slid along his profile, lingering on the play of light in his hazel eyes, which in the muted glow seemed almost green. In moments like these, one could indeed have thought him the sexiest man alive, and one might yearn for him just as the first-years did. Only, you were the lucky one, and they were not. One point to you.

"Ah, Homer. Inexhaustible Homer. The eternal tragedy of Achilles, mirabile dictu…" he began, drawing out the Latin words, tasting them. "I'd call it a melodrama for the uninitiated."

Atticus inclined his head; a few auburn strands fell across his brow.

"Mênis: the blinding rage for his beloved, which turned the demi-god into a monster capable of dragging Hector's corpse around the walls of Troy, desecrating the very idea of heroism. Homer spares us nothing. He forces us to watch as nobility crumbles beneath uncontrollable pride and fury." His finger, bearing a silver signet on the little finger, came to rest upon the page.

"You see, Achilles destroys timê: the respect upon which their fragile heroic world depends. And he does so consciously. That is the true terror. That's the true greatness of poetry: to lance the abscess of human nature, from which even the gods themselves stand but little removed, and to do it with merciless clarity."

He paused. An intellectual fire shone in his eyes that he rarely demonstrated anywhere but in the lecture hall, or in such intimate, nearly conspiratorial meetings in cafés with a select few students.

"They are eternal children with atomic bombs in their hands. Jealous, capricious, vengeful, weaving intrigues over an apple or a wounded vanity." The professor snapped his fingers; the sound was sharp, and you started slightly. "That's the irony of the gods. And we gladly rummage through their dirty laundry: who betrayed whom, who slept with whom, who slandered whom. Fascinating? Without question. Because we do precisely the same to each other."

The professor replaced his glasses, pushing them up the bridge of his nose with a familiar gesture, and let his eyes slide across your faintly flushed cheeks.

"Do you understand what I mean?" he asked more softly. Atticus's voice no longer carried the professor's test of knowledge, but an obsessive interest in your opinion.