“It don’t wear it out,” the New Boy said. “It can keep right on writing forever and ever.”
“Nothing can keep right on forever,” I contended.
He cast about for an argument.
“Trees does,” he produced it.
I glanced up at them. They certainly seemed to bear him out. I decided to abandon the controversy, and I switched with some abruptness to a subject not unconnected with trees, and about which I had often wondered.
“If you was dirt,” I observed, “how could you decide to be into a potato when you could be into an apple just as well?”
The New Boy was plainly taken aback. Here he was, as I see now, doing his best to be friendly and to make conversation personal, to say nothing of his having condescended to parley with a girl at all, and I was rewarding him with an abstraction.
Said he: “Huh?”
“If you was dirt—” I began a little doubtfully, but still sticking to the text.
“I ain’t dirt,” denied the New Boy, with some heat.