great jolt that shakes you up a lot, shakes things into different
proportions."

"Say, that fellow must have been just about the limit!" Arnold's
rather torpid imagination suddenly opened to the story he had heard.

"No, no!" said Sylvia. "As I look back on it, I make a lot more sense
out of it" (she might have been, by her accent, fifty instead of
twenty-three), "and I can see that he wasn't nearly as bad as I
thought him. When I said he wasn't decent, I meant that he belonged in
the Stone Age, and I'm twentieth-century. We didn't fit together. I
suppose that's what we all mean when we say somebody isn't decent ...
that he's stayed behind in the procession. I don't mean that man was
a degenerate or anything like that ... if he could have found a Stone
Age woman he'd have ... they'd have made a good Stone Age marriage of
it. But he _didn't_, the girl he...."

"Do you know, Sylvia," Arnold broke in wonderingly, "I never before in
all my life had anybody speak to me of anything that really mattered.
And I never spoke this way myself. I've wanted to, lots of times; but
I didn't know people ever did. And to think of its being a girl who
does it for me, a girl who...." His astonishment was immense.

"Look here, Arnold," said Sylvia, with a good-natured peremptoriness.
"Let a girl be something besides a girl, can't you!"

But her attempt to change the tone to a light one failed. Apparently,
now that Arnold had broken his long silence, he could not stop
himself. He turned towards her with a passionate gesture of
bewilderment and cried: "Do you remember, before dinner, you asked