Ruth Templeton of disgusted aloofness and sour face, ritually arrived late and left early -- except on Tuesdays, when she stayed until 9:00 p.m. In the second week of March, around 8:30 p.m., Ruth Templeton went after Betsy Barris, her assistant, blaming her for leaving unfinished some project for which Ruth Templeton was responsible. A deadline had passed. Neil heard Ruth Templeton shrieking at trembling Betsy, admitting she was on the verge of hitting Betsy in the head. Neil , who'd been working in an adjoining room, stepped forth just after Ruth Templeton knocked Betsy down. Neil stepped into the room and quickly steered Betsy to safety. He could see she was red faced and shaken. She was shaking, in fact.

Ruth Templeton, immediately after her assault on Betsy, in Neil 's company, wrote out "A Verbal Warning" on a piece of paper and asked Betsy to sign it. Neil insisted Betsy not sign anything, but the shaking girl had proceeded with it. Templeton was punctual the next morning, arriving at work on time for the first time, hand-delivering a copy of her "Verbal Warning" to Betsy to the Personnel Department with a letter releasing Betsy from employment at the Museum.

Soon, lawyers were involved in it -- in the harassment case brought forth by Betsy against Ruth. As it turned out, because Neil hadn't actually seen the assault, Ruth Templeton's attorneys reasoned there had been no witnesses. Betsy begged Neil to lie, to say he had seen with his two good eyes what had happened, to assert that he had witnessed Ruth Templeton's having smacked Betsy in the face. But Neil couldn't do it. He had no problem with saying he'd heard Ruth Templeton hit Betsy, nor that he'd heard her yelling like some jungle banshee prior to smacking Betsy in the face. He said he would tell anyone everything he'd heard with his two good ears.

Neil visited his adviser at the school who recommended he just shut up about it -- let grass grow over it. For Neil to tell his saga of Ruth Templeton's unprofessional behavior, indecency, dishonesty, cunning, wickedness, black heart, and so forth would not topple her from her high place. It would serve only to link her name and his. Was this something Neil wanted? The museum and library community of New England was a small, close-knit one, Neil was warned, and if Neil persisted in his folly, Ruth Templeton's name and his would be joined inextricably all his days. "Let it go," Neil 's adviser advised. "If you fight her, Neil, your name will be entwined with hers. It's a stink of a name to be linked up with, to go down with in people's memories."

Betsy Barris went home to Kansas City. She told Neil she'd be glad of being back amid the gentle winds and splendid sweeps of golden grain prevailing under sunny skies across the vast miles and miles of open fields out in the great midwest. Good for her, Neil thought. At the Museum of the New Physics, dark clouds were sweeping in. Heads would roll.

Shortly after Betsy Barris went back to Kansas, there came a big morning meeting for all staff in the Museum's Spinoza Auditorium. The session was set to begin with the arrival of the Chairman of the Board of Museum Trustees, who had not yet arrived from his home on the elite North Shore. When he finally showed, he bumped his nose on the microphone, then spilled his water when he began speaking. He began by admitting to the assembled that he'd been having a hard day.

"Bad things happen in threes," he began. "First, I burned the toast. Then the train broke down. The third thing --"

This led to a long explanation of the Museum's financial crisis, the Museum Board calling on the administration to trim about $2 million from a projected $5 million deficit for the fiscal year that had just begun on July 1st. Layoffs, of course, were just part of the "package." Sixty employees would be let go. The number of projected exhibitions would be cut from twenty to just twelve. "The insurance costs for things on loan to us are going right through the ceiling," the Chairman of the Board mourned.

Next, the round, bald, red-faced, trembling Museum Director stepped up to the microphone. "The Board of Trustees has the ultimate authority for all decisions," he declared. "They make the policy. That is what our charter and our bylaws say." He compared his job to that of a ranch foreman who kept his cowboys fed and clothed, emphasizing that the ranch was not his to do with as he pleased. He was not responsible for decision making.

News of the deteriorating situation appeared in papers throughout New England, from the Boston Globe to the Camperdene Daily Journal, in the Metrowest Boston area, where "Roping in the Cowboys at the Museum of the New Physics" was headline news. The paper's Cooking columnist, Alice Armour Armstrong, derided "a hyperactive rumor mill" at the "world class" museum. "Staff morale is sinking below sea level. Intrigue is spiraling out of control."

Disgruntled museum employees were complaining not only of the Museum of the New Physics' curator keeping his job, but also of his keeping his home -- a house provided him by the Museum's Board of Trustees. It was said by the blushing curator that this was common practise -- big city museum curators were usually provided with a residence. Public relations officials at museums in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, and Dallas quickly jumped in, saying their curators weren't.

The curator of the Museum of the New Physics kept his job a while longer. Ruth Templeton kept her job a lot longer. Within two months of Templeton's attack on her assistant, Neil was let go. Strangely, Ruth Templeton did not just boot him out on his last day there, but let him wander freely through the institution's labyrinthical sacred chambers, letting him whistle and hum to his heart's content. Throughout the building former staffers, variously screaming or mumbling bitter accusations, packed their things.

The next day, Neil got a call from a member of the Board of Trustees of a small village arts and science museum in Camperdene, Massachusetts. He was invited to interview for the job of curator of The Museum of the Year 1912, which sounded to Neil like exactly the kind of quiet work in just the kind of charming place that he was looking for.