"Now, my dear Bambi, I protest----"

"It will do you no good. Don't I remember how you started off to meet
your nine o'clock class clad in your pyjamas?"

"Oh, my child!"

"Don't talk to me about impracticality. It's my birthright."

"Well, I can prove to you----"

"I never believe anything you have to prove. If I can't see it, first
thing, without any process, it isn't true."

"But if you represent yourself as Y, and Jarvis as X, an unknown
quantity----"

"Professor Parkhurst, stop there! There's nothing so unreliable as
figures, and everybody but a mathematician knows that. Figures lie right
to your face."

"Bambina, if you could coin your conversation----" Professor Parkhurst
began.

"I am sorry to find you unreasonable about Jarvis, Professor."

He gazed at her, in his absent-minded, startled way. He had never
understood her since she was first put into his hands, aged six months,
a fluffy bundle of motherless babyhood. She never ceased to startle him.
She was an enigma beyond any puzzle in mathematics he had ever brought