“I don’t mean funny like something’s funny you laugh at,” Ramsey explained laboriously.  “I mean funny like something that’s out of the way, and you wonder how it ever happened to happen.  I mean it seems funny I’d ever be sittin’ there on a bench with that ole girl I never spoke to in my life or had anything to do with, and talkin’ about the United States goin’ to war.  What we were talkin’ about, why, that seems just as funny as the rest of it.  Lookin’ back to our class picnic, f’r instance, second year of high school, that day I jumped in the creek after—­ Well, you know, it was when I started makin’ a fool of myself over a girl.  Thank goodness, I got that out o’ my system; it makes me just sick to look back on those days and think of the fool things I did, and all I thought about that girl.  Why, she—­ Well, I’ve got old enough to see now she was just about as ordinary a girl as there ever was, and if I saw her now I wouldn’t even think she was pretty; I’d prob’ly think she was sort of loud-lookin’.  Well, what’s passed is past, and it isn’t either here nor there.  What I started to say was this:  that the way it begins to look to me, it looks as if nobody can tell in this life a darn thing about what’s goin’ to happen, and the things that do happen are the very ones you’d swear were the last that could.  I mean—­you look back to that day of the picnic—­my! but I was a rube then—­well, I mean you look back to that day, and what do you suppose I’d have thought then if somebody’d told me the time would ever come when I’d be ’way off here at college sittin’ on a bench with Dora Yocum—­with Dora Yocum, in the first place—­and her crying, and both of us talking about the United States goin’ to war with Germany!  Don’t it seem pretty funny to you, Fred, too?”

“But as near as I can make out,” Fred said, “that isn’t what happened.”

“Why isn’t it?”

“You say ‘and both us talking’ and so on.  As near as I can make out, you didn’t say anything at all.”

“Well, I didn’t—­much,” Ramsey admitted, and returned to his point with almost pathetic persistence.  “But doesn’t it seem kind o’ funny to you, Fred?”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“It does to me,” Ramsey insisted.  “It certainly does to me.”

“Yes,” said Fred cruelly.  “I’ve noticed you said so, but it don’t look any funnier than you do when you say it.”

Suddenly he sent forth a startling shout. “Wow! You’re as red as a blushing beet.”

“I am not!”

“Y’are!” shouted Fred.  “Wow!  The ole woman-hater’s got the flushes!  Oh, look at the pretty posy!”

And, jumping down from the window seat, he began to dance round his much perturbed comrade, bellowing.  Ramsey bore with him for a moment, then sprang upon him; they wrestled vigorously, broke a chair, and went to the floor with a crash that gave the chandelier in Mrs. Meig’s parlour, below, an attack of jingles.