“Dr. Rich, you have a remarkably truthful daughter. This fish is even larger than she said it was.”
“I trust,” smiled the doctor, “that she is just as truthful about everything. She has never told me anything but the truth, and not much of that.”
The sunlight that slanted across the long-sleeved tire seemed to lessen a little as Jean looked up. There was no reproach in the forgetmenot eyes, but the old man’s gentle shot had told. This girl did keep things back from her father. Perhaps she did not let him know when the larder needed replenishing.
Once and again, as the happy meal proceeded, the guest had the same sensation. Now she would flash into merry words, now sink into shadowy reticence. Now she was electrosensitive, now perfectly neutral.
They came to salad, and he lifted the bowl of mayonnaise.
“You ought to have let me make this.”
“No, indeed. That would have cut down my profits.”
Marvin stirred the contents of the bowl and reflected that if he could explain the surface tension in mayonnaise he could explain a great many other things.
She broke in upon his reverie with a little laugh.
“Once upon a time I asked an Indian boy to get me some olive oil. I called it wood oil, because of course he wouldn’t know what olives are. What do you suppose the result was?”