“Don’t you know?” she said kindly.

Then he had an idea. “You mean the bucks? I’ll get them too.”

She slowly shook her head. “Isn’t there something over and above earthly things — some more glorious meaning to one’s life and activities?”

“In baseball?”

“Yes.”

He racked his brain —

“Maybe I’ve not made myself clear, but surely you can see (I was saying this to Walter just before the train stopped) that yourself alone — alone in the sense that we are all terribly alone no matter what people say — I mean by that perhaps if you understood that our values must derive from — oh, I really suppose —” She dropped her hand futilely. “Please forgive me. I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.”

Her eyes were sad. He felt a curious tenderness for her, a little as if she might be his mother (That bird.) and tried very hard to come up with the answer she wanted — something you said about LIFE.

“I think I know what you mean,” he said. “You mean the fun and satisfaction you get out of playing the best way that you know how?”

She did not respond to that.

Roy worried out some other things he might have said but had no confidence to put them into words. He felt curiously deflated and a little lost, as if he had just flunked a test. The worst of it was he still didn’t know what she’d been driving at.

Harriet yawned. Never before had he felt so tongue-tied in front of a girl, a looker too. Now if he had her in bed —

Almost as if she had guessed what he was thinking and her mood had changed to something more practical than asking nutty questions that didn’t count, she sighed and edged closer to him, concealing the move behind a query about his bassoon case. “Do you play?”

“Not any music,” he answered, glad they were talking about something different. “There’s a thing in it that I made for myself.”