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 nothing to them, Grover was savagely reflecting, nothing at all, so why the hell do they keep asking?

Rhoda came to his rescue. "He's going to Paris and see Life for a living," she said, then turned the tables. "I'll bet you didn't know what you were going to make of yourself when you were a Harvard Senior. At any rate you didn't make it, whatever it was. 'You did hot and dusty excavations instead, and got elected a member of societies where they meet in cutaways and listen to papers written by old men with beards about languages nobody can translate, and a fat lot of good it would do them if they could, didn't you!"

"Ah well," Mr. Pearn apologized, "the world wouldn't be so much fun for the rest, without a few old fogeys for contrast. Though don't you ever go and be one, my dear. . . You're not still determined to remain single, I trust?"

"Why should I change my mind?" Rhoda challenged.

Her uncle smiled with the archness that Grover begrudged to fatherly old bachelors. "For the very best of reasons." He turned to Grover. "You agree with me, I'm sure. Thanet."

"Oh," said Grover, "I've always thought Rhoda would make somebody a perfect husband! . . . She proposes to me now and then, but I'd rather keep her for a brother."

"What relation does that make us, I wonder," said