“Oh, I don’t know. If the miracle had happened a year or so ago ... but it didn’t; so what’s the use?”
“Go on and turn it loose,” Bromley encouraged. “Set the clock back a year or so and let us see what it strikes.”
“I had a few ideals then; modest ones, I guess you’d call them. I’d had to break my college course in the third year—family matters. At that time I wanted nothing so much as to go back and finish; and perhaps have a try for a Ph.D. degree afterward.”
“And past that?”
“More of what you’d call the modesties, I guess: a teaching job in some college back home, or something of that sort; a job in which I’d have some leisure for reading, thinking my own thoughts, living my own life.”
“No wife and kiddies in the picture?” Bromley asked, with his most disarming smile.
“No; not then.”
The play-boy laughed softly. “No sentimental foolishness for the austere young student and pedagogue, of course. But the ‘not then’ tells a different story. You’ve met the incomparable ‘her’ in your later avatar?”
It was some measure of the distance he had come on the road to freer human expression that Philip did not at once retreat into the speechless reticences.
“Yes,” he said: “I’ve met a girl.”