Orin's B.U. punting and Joelle
getting a storm-cellar tour of Joe Lon’s incredible Pyrex collection of every solution in the known world that can turn blue litmus paper red, little red rectangles floating in the flasks for proof, Orin nodding a lot and trying incredibly hard and Joelle saying that Mr. van D.’s not once smiling at him was just His Way, was all
Context
The scene's father-daughter panel, and its rhyme is deliberate: the chemist Daddy Joe Lon van Dyne of Shiny Prize KY — the man who decocts Joelle's low-pH dandelion attar special, whose proton-donor firm gives her name its chemistry — receives Orin at Christmas without one smile, and Joelle glosses the coldness as "His Way, was all," the exact phrase she uses for how Orin's own Moms unnerves her. Two families, two withholding parents whose children have each learned to translate the withholding into a fond idiom. The Pyrex flasks that turn litmus red are the father's whole self on display — proof floating in solution — and the son-in-law-to-be can only nod at it. Held here as texture below the male-line spine, per the plan's father-daughter ruling.