Arnold made a fresh start by offering her his cigarette-box.  “Have one,” he invited her, sociably.

She shook her head.

“Oh, all the girls do,” he urged her.

Sylvia laughed.  “I may be a fresh breeze from beyond the Mississippi, but I’m not so fresh as to think it’s wicked for a girl to smoke.  In fact I like to, myself, but I can’t stand the dirty taste in my mouth the next morning.  Smoking’s not worth it.”

“Well ...” 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