r quixotism to marry
him."

Again the girl laughed.

"I total him up like this: fine family, good blood, decent habits,
handsome, healthy, poetic. He might even be affectionate. His one fault
is that he is not adjusted to modern commercial standards. He cannot
make money, or he will not--it comes to the same thing."

"I am unable to see why you are elected to take care of him. He must fit
his time, or perish. You don't happen to be in love with him, do you?"

"No, I--I think not. He interests me more than anybody. I suppose I am
fond of him rather."

"Have you any reason for thinking him in love with you?"

"Mercy, no! He hardly knows I'm alive. He uses me for a conversational
blotting-pad. That's my only use in his eyes."

"He's so very impractical."

"I am used to impractical men. I have taken care of you since I was five
years old."

"Yes, my dear. But I am not trying to feed the world bread when it
demands cheese."

"No, you are distinctly practical. You are only trying to prove a fourth
dimension, when three have sufficed the world up to date."

"Yes, but----"

"No buts. If it had not been for me you would have gone naked and been
arrested, or have forgotten to eat and starved to death."

"Now, my dear Bambi, I protest----"

"It will do you no good. Don't I remember how you started off to meet
your nine o'clock class clad in your pyjamas?"

"Oh, my child!"

"Don't talk to me about impracticality. It's my birthright."

"Well, I can prove to you----"

"I never believe anything you have to prove. If I can't see it, first
thing, without any process, it isn't true."

"But if you represent yourself as Y, and Jarvis as X, an unknown
quantity----"

"Professor Parkhurst, stop there! There's nothing so unreliable as
figures, and everybody but a mathematician knows that. Figures lie right
to your face."

"Bambina, if you could coin your conversation----" Professor Parkhurst
began.

"I am sorry to find you unreasonable about Jarvis, Professor."

He gazed at her, in his absent-minded, startled way. He had never
understood her since she was first put into his hands, aged six months,
a fluffy bundle of motherless babyhood. She never ceased to startle him.
She was an enigma beyond any puzzle in mathematics he had ever brought
his mind to bear upon.

"How old are you, Bambina?"

"Shame on you, and you a mathematician. If James is forty-five, and
Bambina is two thirds of half his age, how old is Ba