"We're both children, compared with Je—compared with some men who are my friends. You're quite young enough to go to engineering school. And take some academic courses on the side—English, so on. Why don't you? Have you ever thought of it?"
"N-no, I hadn't thought of doing it, but—— All right. I will! In Seattle! B'lieve the University of Washington is there."
"You mean it?"
"Yes. I do. You're the boss."
"That's—that's flattering, but—— Do you always make up your mind as quickly as this?"
He smiled, and she smiled back, but this time it was she who was embarrassed. "You're rather overwhelming. You change your life—if you really do mean it—because a jeune fille from Brooklyn is so impertinent, from her Olympian height of finishing-school learning, as to suggest that you do so."
"I don't know what a jeune fille is, but I do know——" He sprang up. He did not look at her. He paraded back and forth, three steps to the right, three to the left, his hands in his pockets, his voice impersonal. "I know you're the finest person I ever met. You're the kind—I knew there must be people like you, because I knew the Joneses. They're the only friends I've got that have, oh, I suppose it's what they call culture."
In a long monologue, uninterrupted by Claire, he told of his affection for the Schoenstrom "prof" and his wife. The practical, slangy Milt of the garage was lost in the enthusiastic undergraduate adoring his instructor in the university that exists as veritably in a teacher's or a doctor's sitting-room in every Schoenstrom as it does in certain lugubrious stone hulks recognized by a state legislature as magically empowered to paste on sacred labels lettered "Bachelor of Arts."
He broke from his revelations to plump down on the bench beside her, to slap his palm with his fist, and sigh, "Lord, I've been gassing on! Guess I bored you!"