“But you began late,” condoned his companion. “And you are still learning. But I cannot see why your aunt should object to your wishing to own a newspaper. One would say, a harmless ambition.”
“One that I’m quite unlikely to realize, now. As for its being harmless, why, my dear child--excuse the freedom of an aged golf-professor--there’s a charge of dynamite in every font of type.”
“Then you have a penchant for high explosives?”
“Have I? I don’t think I’d put it that way,” mused Jeremy. “I’ve a taste for adventure. And running a newspaper of your own has always seemed to me about the liveliest and most adventurous job going. But I don’t want to blow things up.”
“Oh, just to have a hand in things, in a real, live American community like this, where the soil is good and new ideas sprout. I’d like to get into the political fight, too. A really good one, I mean, with something worth aiming at.”
“That I can understand. But I still fail to make you fit into this environment.”
“What about yourself?” he countered “Have n’t you rather the air of coming out of the great world and condescending to this raw and rural town?”
“Have I? Have I been condescending to you?”
“If you had, it would be more than I deserve,” he said contritely. “I’d no business to say that. And I did n’t mean it, anyway. But this is a queer place for you to be, is n’t it?”
“One might call it that. I made inquiries for the most typically American college, and a list was made up for me. I chose the University of Centralia to be with my mother’s cousin, Miss Pritchard.”
“Yes. My mother married again. A German. A man of great scientific attainments and high position. He is very gentle and vague and absent-minded, and good to me. And when I told them that I would like to take my own money and come here to my own country for a year before”--she hesitated almost imperceptibly--“before anything was settled for me, he consented. Think what a wrench it must have been for his old-world prejudices against emancipated women and all that!”
“Yet I don’t think you need Americanizing. You’re a real American type if there ever was one.”
She flushed a little. “I like to hear that. My father would have liked it. What makes you say it?”