"Nobody ever called me queer; not to my face."

"But you are, you know. You oughtn't to be here at all."

"Where ought I to be?"

"How can I answer that riddle without knowing where you have been? Are
you Ulysses--"

"'Knowing cities and the hearts of men,'" he answered, quick to catch
the reference. "No; not the cities, certainly, and very little of the
men."

"There, you see!" she exclaimed plaintively. "You're up on a classical
reference like a college man. No; not like the college men I know,
either. They are too immersed in their football and rowing and too
afraid to be thought high-brow, to confess to knowing anything about
Ulysses. What was your college?"

"This," he said, sweeping a hand around the curve of the horizon.

"And in any one else," she retorted, "that would be priggish as well as
disingenuous."

"I suppose I know what you mean. Out here, when a man doesn't explain
himself, they think it's for some good reason of his own, or bad reason,
more likely. In either case, they don't ask questions."

"I really beg your pardon, Mr. Banneker!"