Years and years of teaching, of dealing with students, of listening to every possible--and in some cases, impossible--excuse had given Noah a fairly fine-tuned bullshit detector. It pinged now, though certainly, Madeleine's big blue eyes and body language, curved in toward him in apparent interest, said otherwise. Most men would've been extremely flattered by her regard, and while it was nice to be the focus of a pretty young thing's attention, she was too close to the age of his students for him to take such a thing seriously.
"I'm glad to meet you as well," Noah replied. "I'm going to assume that you'd rather be called Madeleine. You don't really strike me much as a Maddy." He tipped his head and studied her face. "Most likely not even when you were much younger, yes?" He couldn't imagine her with wind-snarled hair and dirty knees and elbows, swinging on swings or jumping into mud puddles. Seeing her now, very elegant and self-contained and then contrasting it with that mental picture amused him for some reason.