"What now?" asked Sylvia, amused.

"Why, for instance,--that reason for your not smoking. That's not a
girl's reason. That's a man's ... a man who's tried it!"

"No, it isn't!" she said, the flicker of amusement still on her lips.
"A man wouldn't have sense enough to know that smoking isn't worth
waking up with your mouth full of rancid fur."

"Oh gosh!" cried Arnold, tickled by the metaphor: "rancid fur!"

"The point about me, why I seem so queer to you," explained Sylvia,
brightening, "is that I'm a State University girl. I'm used to you.
I've seen hundreds of you! The fact that you wear trousers and have
to shave and wear your hair cut short, and smell of tobacco, doesn't
thrill me for a cent. I know that I could run circles around you if it
came to a problem in calculus, not that I want to brag."

Arnold did not seem as much amused as she thought he would be. He
smoked in a long, meditative silence, and when he spoke again it was
with an unusual seriousness. "It's not what _you_ feel or don't feel
about me ... it's what _I_ feel and don't feel about you, that gets
me," he explained, not very lucidly. "I mean liking you so, without
... I never felt so about a girl. I like it.... I don't make it
out...." He looked at her with sincerely puzzled eyes.

She answered him as seriously. "I think," she said, speaking a little
slowly, "I think the two go together, don't they?"