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PARTISAN REVIEW
for him to talk, and be as little as possible the passive, profiting
listener, drawing him on. But there was no apparent difficulty.
"She's very beautiful. Extremely beautiful," said Scampi.
"I know. That's a great satisfaction. I guess she could have just
about anything she wanted, my sister, because she's clever besides.
Only she makes things hard for herself."
"Wouldn't she say that you were the one that makes things
hard?"
"What are you thinking about, what the old woman said? That
I want to make a nun of Fanny? Don't pay too much attention to
Aunt Phyllis; she's a smart old woman, but there are things she
doesn't know. I'm anxious for Fanny to marry.
If
that were all it was,
it would be simple. But Fanny has ideas about me; she thinks I
haven't done so well by myself. Which I haven't, I suppose; and she
feels she has to straighten me out. She has strong opinions about me.
But of course it isn't true that I don't want her to marry."
"You don't like the man? You're too hard to please, is that it?"
"No, I don't like him very much. But that isn't it either. She
already has her mind made up. She wants me to approve of him, but
making up her mind is the main thing with her.
Her
mind, you see.
So all that was left for me to say, and I said it, was 'Blessings and
congratulations.' But she wanted more than that. I had to go along
with her to meet the Neffs, her in-laws to-be, who live in Galena.
You heard my aunt mention Galena."
"I didn't understand her, however."
"No, I guess you wouldn't have understood. It's a town in the
north end of the state, near Iowa. General Grant used to live there
and his house is a museum. The house is not far from the Neffs' and
the girls took me to see it. Did I mention the girls, Neff's sisters?"
"No."
"Well, I'll tell you about them." Scampi heard, in his pause,
the slight but continuous brushing and quivering of the dynamo in
the power plant below making its interminable cycles. "To begin
with," said Weyl, "Fanny carried me down there on the train, and
all she said she was asking was that I should be a gentleman so that
the Neffs wouldn't think their son was marrying into a family of
tramps. She met me at the depot in Chicago and made me go down
to the basement to have my pants pressed and my shoes shined. AU
