commented Arnold. Apparently he found something very
surprising in this speech. His surprise spread visibly from the
particular to the general, like the rings widening from a thrown
pebble, and he finally broke out: "You certainly do beat the band,
Sylvia. You get _me_! You're a sample off a piece of goods that I
never saw before!"

"What now?" asked Sylvia, amused.

"Why, for instance,--that reason for your not smoking. That's not a
girl's reason. That's a man's ... a man who's tried it!"

"No, it isn't!" she said, the flicker of amusement still on her lips.
"A man wouldn't have sense enough to know that smoking isn't worth
waking up with your mouth full of rancid fur."

"Oh gosh!" cried Arnold, tickled by the metaphor: "rancid fur!"

"The point about me, why I seem so queer to you," explained Sylvia,
brightening, "is that I'm a State University girl. I'm used to you.
I've seen hundreds of you! The fact that you wear trousers and have
to shave and wear your hair cut short, and smell of tobacco, doesn't
thrill me for a cent. I know that I could run circles around you if it
came to a problem in calculus, not that I want to brag."

Arnold did not seem as much amused as she thought he would be. He
smoked in a long, meditative silence, and when he spoke again it was
with an unusual seriousness. "It's not what _you_ feel or don't feel
about me ... it's what _I_ feel and don't feel about you, that gets
me," he explained, not very lucidly. "I mean liking you so, without
... I never felt so about a girl. I like it.... I don't make it
out...." He looked at her with sincerely puzzled eyes.

She answered him as seriously. "I think," she said, speaking a little
slowly, "I think the two go together, don't they?"

"How do you mean?" he asked.

"Why--it's hard to say--" she hesitated, but evidently not at all in
embarrassment, looking at him with serious eyes, limpid and unafraid.
"I've been with boys and men a lot, of course, in my classes and in
the laboratories and everywhere, and I've found out that in most cases
if the men and the girls really, really in their own hearts don't want
to hurt each other, don't want to get something out of the other, but
just want to be friends--why, they _can_ be! Psychologists and all
the big-wigs say they can't be, I know--but, believe me!--I've tried
it--and it's awfully nice, and it's a shame that everybody shouldn't
know that lots of the time you _can_ do it--in spite of the folks wh