“Have I? Have I been condescending to you?”
“If you had, it would be more than I deserve,” he said contritely. “I’d no business to say that. And I did n’t mean it, anyway. But this is a queer place for you to be, is n’t it?”
“Not for my purposes?”
“Are you specializing at Old Central?”
“One might call it that. I made inquiries for the most typically American college, and a list was made up for me. I chose the University of Centralia to be with my mother’s cousin, Miss Pritchard.”
“Just like that? All yourself?”
“All myself,” she assented gravely.
“You came here to get Americanized?”
“Yes. My mother married again. A German. A man of great scientific attainments and high position. He is very gentle and vague and absent-minded, and good to me. And when I told them that I would like to take my own money and come here to my own country for a year before”—she hesitated almost imperceptibly—“before anything was settled for me, he consented. Think what a wrench it must have been for his old-world prejudices against emancipated women and all that!”
“Yet I don’t think you need Americanizing. You’re a real American type if there ever was one.”