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.