He besieged Worm with questions about the Black Tiger, and Worm told him a great deal about European sports cars of all kinds. Worm seemed to be familiar with every kind of car that had ever been manufactured, and Woody was abashed to discover that in Worm's opinion the kind of mechanical work they were doing in the garage was closer, as he put it, to butchery than surgery.
"These buckets o' bolts don't call for a real mechanic," Worm said. This so annoyed Woody that he protested American cars were acknowledged the finest in the world.
"Aye," said Worm, "for what they're built for—plenty of horsepower so ye don't have to change gear, fast getaway, and enough springing for a feather bed. Ye can no beat them there. But they'll no take a sharp corner fast. They carry aboot a ton of chrome fittings just tae make them look pretty. They'll nae gie ye more than twelve or fourteen miles tae a gallon of gas. Hoot mon. Do ye call it engineering when somebody builds a two-ton car to take a two-hundred-pound man tae work?"
That quieted Woody for a while, and he went back to his dream of the Black Tiger.
In the meantime, Mary Jane was beginning to find that the philosophy of salesmanship and the company of Bob Peters left something to be desired as a steady diet. It was fun, to be sure, to drive around town in a yellow Buick convertible with the wind whipping through her dark, curly hair. Bob had taken her out three times since their first date and each time for the kind of adult evening that she wished Woody would get interested in. The first time he'd taken her to a nice quiet place where there wasn't a juke box (always a mark of sophistication for Mary Jane) and then to a lecture at the civic auditorium. The lecture was given by the sales manager of a big rubber company, and he had discussed selling techniques for an hour and a half.
Bob had spent the hour and a half taking notes in a black notebook with his name in gold letters on the front of it. Mary Jane was slightly piqued because he hadn't said anything about her hair, which she had fixed specially for the evening. But she reminded herself that she was being childish and told Bob that she had found the lecture very exciting.
This had the effect of encouraging Bob to invite her to two more evenings of a similar nature. At one of them, a personnel manager had discussed factors in the making of young executives. Bob took notes on that too. At another, an advertising manager had discussed the results of an experiment in which five hundred people had been sent circulars in which they were promised a dollar if they returned the circular with their names and addresses on it.
The only bright point in that lecture was that somebody had apparently collected twenty copies of the circular from other people's trash barrels and so got twenty dollars for himself.
When, therefore, Bob called her again with a proposal to hear a visiting psychologist lecture on "Egotism as a Factor in Sales Resistance," she decided she had had enough and said she was busy.
"I just don't know what's the matter with men," she said putting the phone down. "When Woody takes me out, all he does is talk about cars. And when Bob takes me out, he keeps trying to improve my mind. Isn't there anybody who will take me out just because I'm me?"