“Seventeen?”
“Oh, ever so much older. Guess again.”
“Eighteen, then?”
“I'll be nineteen in January—January third—just one month from to-day.”
“Mercy! You're very venerable, to be sure. And then, having graduated from the Normal College, what an immense deal of wisdom you must possess, too!”
She laughed as gayly as though he had perpetrated a rare witticism; and then said, “No, seriously, I never learned much at the Normal College—I mean in the classes—except a lot of mathematics and Latin, which I've forgotten all about now. I learned a little from the other girls, though. Some of them were wonderfully intelligent and cultivated; and they put me on the track of good books and such things. Shall we start home now?” (They rose and began to retrace their steps.) “Tell me, Mr. Bacharach, what is the one book which you like best of all?”
“That's rather a hard question. Suppose I were to put it to you, could you answer it?”
“Oh, yes. I think 'Adam Bede' is the greatest book that was ever written.”
“That's saying a vast deal, isn't it?”
“Well, of course, I mean the greatest book of its kind—the most vivid and truthful picture of real deep feeling. I wasn't thinking of scientific books, or essays, or histories, like Spencer, or Emerson, or Macaulay. I mean, it pierces-deeper into the heart, than any other book that I have read.”