"Plague take the thing! Got any idea what's the matter with it?"
"Let me have your note-book," ordered the young lady, and, without waiting for a reply, removed it genially from his reluctant fingers and annexed the pencil. "There!" she said. "Now, it's simple enough—don't you see? X has the significance of the real part of the complex."
"Well," declared Bennie, with obvious admiration, "you're certainly a shark at mathematics!"
The young lady took out her watch.
"You had better be thankful that I'm not the man-eating variety—it's nearly lunch-time!"
If Professor Hooker's eyes had been as sensitive to delicate shades of the complexion as they were to the varied hues shown in his spectrophotometer, he would have noticed that a pink flush—very nearly wave-length 6250, he would have said—spread over her face as she caught his eye; but this incident wholly escaped his notice.
At the same moment, the bellow of a factory whistle somewhere over Alexandria way caused Professor Hooker to arouse himself out of his state of semilethargy.
"By thunder, it's one o'clock!" he exclaimed, and, without further ado, he arose, bolted across the Circle, and made a flying leap for a street-car which was just swinging into Connecticut Avenue. The tailor-made girl followed him with an amused gaze.
"I really believe I know more mathematics than he does," she remarked complacently to herself. "But isn't he just a dear?" And with that, she too, arose and walked briskly away, as if she knew exactly where she was going—which she did.