determine whether or not he was looking at her Marcia smiled at
him.

"Please explain."

Horace turned.

"If I do, will you promise to tell Charlie Moon that I wasn't
in?"

"Uh-uh."

"Very well, then. Here's my history: I was a 'why' child. I
wanted to see the wheels go round. My father was a young
economics professor at Princeton. He brought me up on the system
of answering every question I asked him to the best of his
ability. My response to that gave him the idea of making an
experiment in precocity. To aid in the massacre I had ear
trouble--seven operations between the age of nine and twelve. Of
course this kept me apart from other boys and made me ripe for
forcing. Anyway, while my generation was laboring through Uncle
Remus I was honestly enjoying Catullus in the original.

"I passed off my college examinations when I was thirteen because
I couldn't help it. My chief associates were professors, and I
took a tremendous pride in knowing that I had a fine
intelligence, for though I was unusually gifted I was not
abnormal in other ways. When I was sixteen I got tired of being a
freak; I decided that some one had made a bad mistake. Still as
I'd gone that far I concluded to finish it up by taking my degree