At this point Miss Baker said: “Absolutely!” with such suddenness that I started⁠—it was the first word she had uttered since I came into the room.

I was rather literary in college⁠—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News⁠—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.”

Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven⁠—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savours of anticlimax.

This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament”⁠—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.