“Do you attend the university?” he ventured.
“Yes. It’s a habit,” she laughed. “Three years of it.”
“What line are you especially interested in, Miss MacDowell?”
“None, Mr. Bard. I didn’t come to college to get an education.”
“Indeed! Why, then, did you come, may I ask?”
“Oh, just to get enough highbrow information so that I would know what highbrows were talking about.” She said this quite seriously, with a note of unexpected bitterness in her voice. “If there’s one cruel advantage one person ever takes of another it’s to talk about something of which the other person knows nothing. If I hadn’t come to the university, then, no matter where I went, any girl who had waded through Horace, or physics, or solid geometry, could make me shrivel into insignificance by mentioning ‘O fons Bandusiæ,’ or Boyle’s law or conic sections. As it stands now I know a Latin poem by its sound. I know that a law in physics isn’t essential to individual happiness, and that conic sections (so far as I’m concerned) are nothing but an inconsiderate imposition.”
Mauney laughed and drew up a couple of chairs.
“Now, for argument’s sake,” he said, when they were seated—“mathematics is great. It’s wonderful to know that there is an eternal principle of fitness governing problems of numbers.”
“It may be wonderful enough,” she conceded, leaning over the arm of her chair, “but to dwell on it would take the pastoral quality clean out of life for me. I’m lacking in appreciation of such marvels. I’m interested in folks—just folks. I want to know how they feel. I want to understand folks.”