While willing to oblige Miss Exeter in every particular, while eager to help her and make her appear a worker of miracles, her mere proximity prevented his mind from functioning at all. Do what she could, her efforts to get him thinking about the problem of three men, A, B and C, who, working together, could do a piece of work in three days, was like trying to crank a dead automobile. She tried beaming upon him, she tried being severe; either way his intense emotion flooded his mental processes.
She thought, "I've solved worse problems than this, but I'm sure I don't know what to do."
He himself gave her the clew. She had explained for the third time that if you let x equal the number of days that it took A, working alone—when he interrupted her. He was sitting beside her, leaning his head on his hand and staring at her in a maze of admiration.
Suddenly he said, "Do you like teaching, Miss Exeter?"
"I like teaching girls," she answered with a quick inspiration.
He drove his unwilling intelligence to take in this incredible statement.
"Girls," he said, opening his honest blue eyes and wrinkling his forehead. "Why girls?"
"They're so much cleverer than boys."
She tossed it off as if were a well-known and generally admitted fact. He was gentle with her.