"Do you mind if I ask? How long've you worked at being a fireman?"
"Since I was twenty, ten years ago."
"Do you ever read any of the books you burn?"
He laughed. "That's against the law!"
"Oh. Of course."
"It's fine work. Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn 'em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That's our official slogan."
They walked still further and the girl said, "Is it true that long ago firemen put fires out instead of going to start them?"
"No. Houses have always been fireproof, take my word for it."
"Strange. I heard once that a long time ago houses used to burn by accident and they needed firemen to stop the flames."
He laughed.
She glanced quickly over. "Why are you laughing?"
"I don't know." He started to laugh again and stopped. "Why?"
"You laugh when I haven't been funny and you answer right off. You never stop to think what I've asked you."
He stopped walking. "You are an odd one," he said, looking at her. "Haven't you any respect?"
"I don't mean to be insulting. It's just I love to watch people too much, I guess."
"Well, doesn't this mean anything to you?" He tapped the numerals 451 stitched on his char-colored sleeve.
"Yes," she whispered. She increased her pace. "Have you ever watched the jet cars racing on the boulevards down that way?"
"You're changing the subject!"
"I sometimes think drivers don't know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly," she said. "If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! he'd say, that's grass! A pink blur? That's a rose garden! White blurs are houses. Brown blurs are cows. My uncle drove slowly on a highway once. He drove forty miles an hour and they jailed him for two days. Isn't that funny, and sad, too?"
"You think too many things," said Montag, uneasily.
"I rarely watch the 'parlor walls' or go to races or Fun Parks. So I've lots of time for crazy thoughts, I guess. Have you seen the two-hundred-foot-long billboards in the country beyond town? Did you know that once billboards were only twenty feet long? But cars started rushing by so quickly they had to stretch the advertising out so it would last."
"I didn't know that!" Montag laughed abruptly.
"Bet I know something else you don't. There's dew on the grass in the morning."
He suddenly couldn't remember if he had known this or not, and it made him quite irritable.
"And if you look"--she nodded at the sky--"there's a man in the moon."
He hadn't looked for a long time.
They walked the rest of the way in silence, hers thoughtful, his a kind of clenching and uncomfortable silence in which he shot her accusing glances. When they reached her house all its lights were blazing.
"What's going on?" Montag had rarely seen that many house lights.
"Oh, just my mother and father and uncle sitting around, talking. It's like being a pedestrian, only rarer. My uncle was arrested another time--did I tell you?--for being a pedestrian. Oh, we're most peculiar."
"But what do you talk about?"