‘Dear, my dear, your heart is intelligent . . . I think it is! God help me if it isn’t! Oh, it is!’

‘Say, I’ll settle down and read like the dickens — Tolstoi and biology and all those things.’

‘We’ll read together. I don’t really know anything except what I parrot from Father.’

‘You’ll have to stand for keeping after me and making me work — be hard on you, but now we can’t help it — this love business got so hold of me — feel like I was swimming in some rapids. We’ll be married before this week is up!’

‘But don’t they expel students that marry, at Truxon?’

‘Um-huh.’

‘But don’t you think you have to finish college?’

‘We can’t go on pretending to be a couple of monks.’

‘No. Perhaps not.’

‘I’ll get a job right away. Dad bellyaches about it, but I can depend on him to find . . .’

‘No! Howard! We mustn’t depend on anybody! And besides! I have a hunch that Father Cornplow, the darling, is getting pretty fed up on having a bunch of grown-up huskies like you and Sara, and maybe me, hanging on to him as if we were babies with the measles. Be nice if he would give you a job, but . . . He’s not like Putnam. That One enjoys having me stick around, so he can nag me and try out all the nifties he heard in Munich and Florence. Father Fred doesn’t owe us a thing, not any longer, and he’s beginning to suspect it . . .’

‘He’s GOT to help us! The world and the government and your own folks owe everybody a living.’

‘You know: my father — sometimes he’s pretty bright, or else he knows what books to steal from — he was saying that there isn’t any government; there’s nothing but a lot of people that are the government only they don’t know it.’

‘Maybe, but a fellow’s own parents . . . I never asked to be born.’

‘I doubt if anybody invited you to, either! No. If Father Fred gets sick of nursing us, I won’t blame him. He’s not asking us to marry — if we do get married . . .’

‘We do!’

‘Looks so, from this side. But I want us to economize. I’m crazy to. Honestly, honey, I’d get more kick out of having the nerve to do without things than I ever would getting them. Live in one room, if necessary. And I really am a pretty good cook — Putnam, the old gourmet, has seen to that. Let’s live on eighteen dollars a week, if we have to . . .’

‘Sure. That’s O.K. by me. But before we start, there’s a few things we’ll have to have, and I’m busted just this minute, so Brother Cornplow will have to come through. We’ll need a new radio — I haven’t anything but my little portable — and the one in the car, of course — but that’s a cinch; I’d be perfectly satisfied with a radio that didn’t cost over fifty bucks.’