“Oh,” I remarked. You notice that I had found occasion to use the foregoing expletive several times since first meeting Miss Maria Mitchell Kiewit.
She nodded gloomily in acknowledgment of my sympathetic comprehension. “Yes, once when I described lights in a fog as ‘losing their chromatic identity’ instead of saying they ‘blurred into the mist,’ she asked me to drop physics in the high school. She said it was ruinous, it was destroying the delicacy of my perceptions.”
“Doesn’t your mother ever——” I hesitated, then decisively, “doesn’t she ever laugh?”
Maria dimpled suddenly. “Oh, yes, yes! She’s my dearest, best friend, and we have fun all the time except when she talks about my becoming a writer. She said that now at college I could show if there was any hope in me. She meant that this is my chance to learn to write. I—I——” She paused and glanced at me dubiously from under her lashes. “I sent in that story just to show her that I couldn’t write. I was going to tell her I had tried and failed.”
“Oh!” Then I chuckled, and the freshman after a moment of half resentful pouting joined in with a small reluctant laugh.
“It is funny,” she said, “I think that maybe from your side of the affair it is awfully funny. But——”
I turned the knob swiftly. “No but about it. I shall write that note this minute, and you shall mail it home at once. That is the only right thing to do.”
“Yes.” She heaved a deep, long sigh. “I know that. I have worked it all out as an original in geometry. For instance: Given, an unselfish mother with a special ambition for her rebellious selfish daughter. Problem: to decide which one should sacrifice her own wishes. Let the mother’s desire equal this straight line, and the daughter’s inclination equal this straight line at right angles to the other. To prove——”
“See here, little girl,” I interrupted her kindly but firmly, “no wonder your mother dreads the effect of mathematical studies on your tender brain! I said farewell to geometry exactly two years and four months ago. I did the examination in final trig three times. Comprehend? Now run into your own room and get that letter written quick. If you are very agreeable indeed, I may let you enclose the proof sheets, who knows?”
“Thank you,” she exclaimed in impulsive joy, “that will be lovely. Mother will be so pleased.” Then the vision of coming woe in exile from beloved calculations descended upon her, and she hugged the paper figures so convulsively that the sharpest, most beautiful angle of the biggest polyhedron cracked clear across from edge to edge. They were perfectly splendid clean edges, edges that even I could see had been formed by the carefully loving hands of a mathematical prodigy.