“It will do you no good.  Don’t I remember how you started off to meet your nine o’clock class clad in your pyjamas?”

“Oh, my child!”

“Don’t talk to me about impracticality.  It’s my birthright.”

“Well, I can prove to you——­”

“I never believe anything you have to prove.  If I can’t see it, first thing, without any process, it isn’t true.”

“But if you represent yourself as Y, and Jarvis as X, an unknown quantity——­”

“Professor Parkhurst, stop there!  There’s nothing so unreliable as figures, and everybody but a mathematician knows that.  Figures lie right to your face.”

“Bambina, if you could coin your conversation——­” Professor Parkhurst began.

“I am sorry to find you unreasonable about Jarvis, Professor.”

He gazed at her, in his absent-minded, startled way.  He had never understood her since she was first put into his hands, aged six months, a fluffy bundle of motherless babyhood.  She never ceased to startle him.  She was an enigma beyond any puzzle in mathematics he had ever brought his mind to bear upon.

“How old are you, Bambina?”

“Shame on you, and you a mathematician.  If James is forty-five, and Bambina is two thirds of half his age, how old is Bambi?  I’m nineteen.”

His startled gaze deepened.

“Oh, you cannot be!” he objected.

“There you are.  I told you figures lie.  It says so in the family Bible, but maybe I’m only two.”

“Nineteen years old!  Dearie me!”

“You see I’m quite old enough to know my own mind.  Have you a nine o’clock class this morning?”

“I have.”

“Well, hasten, Professor, or you’ll get a tardy mark.  It’s ten minutes of nine now.”

He jumped up from his chair and started for the door.

“Don’t you want this notebook?” she called, taking up the pad beside his plate.

“Yes, oh, yes, those are my notes.  Where have I laid my glasses?  Quick, my dear!  I must not be late.”

“On your head,” said she.

She followed him to the hall, reminded him of his hat, his umbrella, restored the notebook, and finally saw him off, his thin back, with its scholarly stoop, disappearing down the street.

Bambina went back to the breakfast table, and took up the paper.  She read all the want “ads” headed “female.”

“Nothing promising here,” she said.  “I wonder if I could bring myself to teach little kids one, two, and one, two, three, in a select dancing class?  I’d loathe it.”

A ponderous black woman appeared in the door and filled it.

“Is you froo?”

“Yes, go ahead, Ardelia.”

“Hab the Perfessor gone already?”

“Yes, he’s gone.”

“Well, he suttinly did tell me to remin’ him of suthin’ this mohnin’, and I cain’t des perzactly bemember what it was.”

“Was it important?”