"The worst of it is, I don't know the sex of my new friend, which makes it a little awkward," continued Nattie.
Quimby stared.
"Don't—I beg pardon—don't know her—his—sex?" he repeated, with wide-open eyes.
"No, it was on the wire, you know!" again explained Nattie, privately thinking him unusually stupid; "about seventy miles away. We first quarreled and then had a pleasant talk."
"Talk—seventy miles—" faltered the perplexed Quimby; then brightening,
"Oh! I see! a telephone, you know!"
"No indeed!" replied Nattie, laughing at his incomprehensibility. "We don't need telephones. We can talk without—did you not know that? And what is better, no one but those who understand our language can know what we say!"
"Exactly!" answered Quimby, relapsing again into wonder. "Exactly—on the wire!"
"Yes, we talk in a language of dots and dashes, that even Miss Kling might listen to in vain. And do you know," she went on confidentially, "somehow, I am very much interested in my new friend. I wish I knew—its so awkward, as I said—but I really think it's a gentleman!"
"Exactly—exactly so!" responded Quimby, somewhat dejectedly. And during the remainder of their walk he was very much harassed in his mind over this interest Nattie confessed in her new friend—"on the wire,"—who would appear as a tight-rope performer to his perturbed imagination. And he felt in his inmost heart that it would be a great relief to his mind if this mysterious person should prove a lady, even though, if a gentleman, he was many miles away. For Quimby, with all his obtusity, had an inkling of the power of mystery, and was already far enough on the road to love to be jealous.
Of these thoughts Nattie was of course wholly unaware, and chatted gayly, now of the distant "C" and now of the coming Miss Archer, to her somewhat abstracted, but always devoted companion.